Laughter at the Academy

by Seanan McGuire

  That’s her on the roof of the library, stretched flat with her scope circling her eye like a wedding ring. Every shot she takes is true, and she takes a lot of them. Nobody dies, but there’s enough damaged as to take the edge off. Then the bell rings in her ear, and she rolls away from the edge of the roof, vanishing into the shadows. Fun’s over.

  Tip to tail, they took six minutes to bleed the beast, leaving shattered glass and frightened townies behind like a calling card. Cherry will check her bank balance later and find a healthy payoff from an uncle she doesn’t have, on an outworld that may or may not exist. It doesn’t matter to her. She’s worked off a little of her aggression here, in the shadows and the dust, and that leaves her head clear enough for the real work to begin.

  C IS FOR COVER STORY

  “Now, can anyone tell me the origins of the human race? Where did we begin?” The one-room schoolhouse is ringed with windows, letting in so much light from outside that the overheads don’t need to be turned on for most of the year. By the time the weather turns sour, the schoolhouse solars will have fed enough into the local grid that they won’t have to pay a penny for the power they use. There’s value in self-sufficiency.

  The kids are a surly bunch, growling and glaring as they squat at their desks like so many infuriated mushrooms. These are the children of asteroid miners, farmers, and artisans, not rich enough to go to the fine boarding schools on Earth or Io, but not poor enough to be restricted to home schooling and play dates. They get the bulk of their lessons on their personalized terminals, but they’re here for the social contact with their peers, to learn how to get along and how to form connections that will serve them for the rest of their lives. There are fourteen teachers working this part of the solar system, and Miss Cherry is a newcomer here, arriving at the start of the term. They still don’t trust her. They still don’t know whether they should.

  She leans against her desk, resting her weight on her hands, and smiles winningly at them. They do not smile back at her. She’s hard to measure with the eye, a wisp of a thing in a blue dress printed with white daisies, her long dark hair hanging loose and sometimes getting in her eyes when she gets excited and begins waving her hands around. They’re generally good at telling someone’s age by the way they move, these children of the regen generation—when your grandfather can look like your little brother if he finds the scratch, you learn to read a body for the years it’s seen—but Cherry is a book of riddles, one moment as open as a kindie, the next as closed-off as a three-time regen. Her face puts her in her early twenties, by far the most popular age with women trying to survive in the outer moons.

  “Anyone?” she asks, and there is a sharp, sweet disappointment in her tone, like she can’t believe they wouldn’t know the answer to such a simple question. “I suppose I’ll have to recommend all your consoles be set to remedial human history for the rest of the term, then. I hate to do it—”

  “So don’t!” shouts a voice from the back of the room.

  Cherry’s head snaps up, and those sweet and easy eyes turn suddenly cold, the eyes of a predator searching for its prey. “Who said that?” she asks, scanning the crowd.

  They’ve been in this schoolhouse a lot longer than she has; every child in the class knows how to hunker down and look like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They shift and look away, avoiding her gaze.

  “You.” Her finger stabs out like an accusation. “Why not?”

  Her target, Timothy Fulton, squirms, but only a little. He doesn’t bother denying that he was the one who spoke: she’s got him, fair and square. Instead, he shrugs and says, “Because we’ve been over all the remedial stuff. We don’t want to do it again.”

  “Well, then, you can spare yourself and your classmates a lot of boring scutwork by being a hero and answering my question.” She isn’t smiling. This is the first time since she arrived at the start of the month that she hasn’t been smiling. “What was the origin of the human race?”

  “Earth, ma’am. Humanity began on Earth.”

  “Very good. When did we move on to bigger and brighter things?”

  “The Twenty-Second Century, ma’am, after we figured out how to adapt ourselves to other planets, and how to adapt other planets to ourselves.”

  Miss Cherry nods encouragingly. “Very good. What was the first great war after colonization? Anyone?”

  Ermine Dale has never been able to sit by while other children were praised and she was not. She puts up her hand, waiting only for Miss Cherry to point at her before blurting, “It was over what makes a human, ma’am. Whether Jovians and Neptuneans were still people, given all the modifications they’d gone through.”

  “That’s right.” Cherry pushes away from her desk and walks around it to the chalkboard, an archaic piece of set dressing that nonetheless seems to help students learn and retain information. In a bold hand, she writes the number “10,” and circles it before she turns back to the class and says, “This is the average number of years between wars since humanity stretched beyond a single planet. This is how long we have to rest, recover, and learn to do better. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “To rest?” asks Timothy, and his confusion is the class’s confusion.

  Miss Cherry smiles. “No. I’m here to teach you to do better.”

  I IS FOR INEVITABILITY

  She’s been here a full season, eight local months stretching and blending together on this farmer’s paradise of a Jovian moon. Ganymede has taken well to terraforming, and Earth’s crops have taken well to Ganymede. Half the moons of Jupiter get their food from here, and that makes it a bright and glittering target in the nighttime sky. When the next war comes—there’s always a next war—she expects the sides to fight mercilessly to own the sky’s breadbasket.

  The children have accepted her. They bring her apples and icefruit from the fields, and some of them have started to shyly tell her what they want to be when they grow up. Someday most of them will be farmers, but some of them may be explorers, or diplomats, or poets, if they get the chance to strengthen their roots on this good soil until the time comes for them to bloom. She likes these pauses maybe best of all. They remind her that the human race has a purpose beyond blowing itself to cinders against the stars. “We can be something more than fireworks, if we’re willing to put the work in,” that was what her long-dead lover told her once, when they were lying naked to the unseeing eye of Jupiter on the barren, rocky soil of this selfsame moon, barely cloaked then in its thin envelope of atmosphere, still an experiment on the verge of going eternally wrong. “We can be anything.”

  That wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now, but oh, weren’t they pretty words?

  The fact that she’s thinking of him isn’t a good sign. Means she’s getting restless, and when she gets restless, she either needs to move on or find something that can bleed off some of that energy. So she sends a quiet query to her contacts, lets them know she might be available for a little pick-up work if the price is right and the location is far enough from Ganymede. Maybe something out-system. Summer break is coming soon, and her kids will be needed in the fields. Easy then for a schoolteacher to slip away on errands of her own. As long as she makes it back before the apples come in, she’ll be fine.

  She’s still teaching her classes and waiting for a job to present itself when the choice is taken away from her. Choices are like that. Some of them exist only for as long as it takes not to make them.

  They’re in the middle of a comparative theology lesson when the first shots are fired, big, loud things that boom through the still-thin atmosphere like the world itself is ending. Miss Cherry drops the book she was reading from and bolts for the door. The children are sitting frozen at their desks, too stunned to react. By the time the book hits the floor, she’s gone.

  Ermine starts to cry.

  Then Miss Cherry is back, and there’s a light in her eyes they’ve never seen before, something wild and cold at the same time, like Io, like the
stars. “Get to the cellar!” she shouts. “Now!”

  She’s the teacher, and so they obey her, running like rabbits for their bolt hole under the building. It’s not until they hear the lock slide home behind them that anyone realizes she hasn’t followed, that she’s still out there.

  In the dark, hesitantly, Timothy asks, “Was Miss Cherry holding a gun?”

  No one’s really sure. They hold each other close and listen to the distant, terribly close sound of gunfire.

  K IS FOR KILLER

  Children are like seeds, only they all look exactly the same; there’s no way to look at them and say “this one’s a flower, this one’s a tree, this one’s a strain of tangle-vine designed to break up ore deposits on the moons of Neptune.” All you can do is water them, feed them, give them good soil, and watch how they grow. Be careful what you give them, because it’ll change what comes out the other side. Something that could’ve been a rose may come out all thorns and fury if you plant it wrong.

  It wasn’t just one thing that went into growing Charity Smith. No one even agrees on what soil she was first planted in. She was Earth-born, she was a Martian, she was one of the first settlers on Ganymede, she was altered Jovian and then back again after the war started, when she realized heavy bones and thick skin didn’t suit a sniper. She was an Ionian mermaid, she was an asteroid miner, she was everybody’s daughter and nobody’s wife. No one claimed her, not at the beginning and not after. But we do know this much:

  One of the places she put down roots was Titan. Her name’s on the first settler manifest, pretty as you please, writ down proper in her own hand. She came in as an educator, fresh from Mars—and there’s some will say this supports the idea that she was Martian born, while others say she couldn’t have gotten a release from the red planet if she’d been a citizen, with the threat of war so close and them so very much in need of trained instructors. It doesn’t so much matter, because she was just a teacher, with none of the scars or patches that came after. Titan was newly terraformed back then, and they needed people like her. People who knew how to work for their keep.

  There is one surviving holo of the time Miss Charity Smith spent as a schoolteacher on Saturn’s largest moon. It shows her in one of the sundresses she still wears these all these long years later, her hands clasped in front of her and a smile upon her face as she stands with her students in front of the Titansport schoolhouse. It was just one room, one of the first frontier schools built out past Mars, and she couldn’t look prouder if you paid her. There are twenty-seven children in the shot, all of them looking at the camera with varying expressions of boredom and mistrust. They were the sons and daughters of bankers, miners, and farmers; they had no one to speak for them but their parents and their teacher. They were seeds looking for good soil, and Miss Cherry was their gardener, as wide-eyed and idealistic as they were themselves.

  All that changed on the night the ships arrived.

  There had been rumbles of war in-system for months. Earth fundamentalists thought the modifications of the Neptune settlers had gone too far; said the Neptuneans were no longer human, and hence had no claim to their home world’s rich mineral deposits. The Neptuneans didn’t take too kindly to that, and had responded with threats of their own. As for who fired the first shot, well, that’s just one more thing lost to the mists of history, which are fond of obfuscation, but not so fond of being cleared away. Someone struck first. Someone else responded. And before most of the solar system even knew we were at war, the great ships were flying in search for strategic bases to use in their quest to obliterate the enemy.

  Titan was well-situated for a lot of purposes. It was a good refueling station, and a better supply depot, with its farms and its farmers and its ready supply of livestock in both clone and field-grown forms. That was why the ships raced each other there; that was why the first real battle of the Great Earth-Neptune War was fought, not in the safely empty depths of space, but in the sky over Titansport.

  It was local winter. All the children were in school, as was one young and frightened schoolteacher who had never tried to defend the things she cared for. She was still a seed herself, in many ways; she was still growing.

  We don’t know the full details of what happened on that day. Only one person does, and she’s not talking. Here is what we do know: the school burned. The children died. And Charity Smith walked away, someone else’s rifle in her hands, and all the blood of a generation nurturing her roots.

  We made her. We earned her. It’s three hundred years gone from that night, and we’re watering her still. May all the gods of all the worlds that are have mercy on our souls.

  M IS FOR MURDER

  Everyone has heard the stories, of course; they’re part of the two-bit opera that is the history of the Populated Worlds of the Solar System. No one believes that sort of crap, not really, not until they’ve come skimming through the thin atmosphere of a fresh-terraformed moon and found a woman with dark hair and cold eyes standing on the bell spire of the church with a disruptor rifle in her hands. They’re coming in fast and hot and there isn’t time for course correction, so the order is given: ready, aim, fire. Blow the stupid little gunslinger wanna-be back to the dust that spawned her and prepare for the payday.

  Cherry’s been to this rodeo before. If the pilot had been one of hers, he would’ve pulled up, no matter what his captain told him. Her presence is a warning and a promise—”This town is mine,” and “I will end you,” both wrapped in one denim and flannel package. She’s shown her face. She has no regrets, and she never wants them. She buried her regrets in the soil on Titan. So she pulls the trigger and leaps clear before the ship’s engines realize what she’s done to them. EMP guns are illegal on all the settled worlds, but so is killing children, so she figures her accounts will balance in the end.

  The ship goes down hard in the middle of town. It takes out the church as it descends. It misses the school. That’s all she’s ever cared about. Adults are grown; their seeds are sprouted, and for the most part, they’re past the point where they can change what they’ll become. Children, though, children are still capable of domestication. They can learn from the errors of their past.

  Cherry takes her time as she saunters toward the wreckage. Faces appear in windows and doorways, gawking at her, taking note of her face and her place in the community. She’ll have to move on after this. She always does. That’s all right. The kids here are good students, and they’ve learned their lessons well. They’ll grow up a little better than their parents, and when she makes her way back here to teach their grandchildren, some of them may smile at her in the streets, duck their heads and touch their hats, and never say her name out loud.

  The hatch of the ship is rocking back and forth when she gets there. She sighs, sets her engine-killer gun aside, and pulls the smaller, more personal revolver from her belt. She’s standing patient as the stone when the hatch creaks open some minutes later, and the face of a green-skinned Ionian appears in the opening.

  He pales when he sees her. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he says.

  “That makes two of us,” she replies, and pulls her trigger. The gunshot echoes through the town, followed by the sound of windows slamming shut and doors being locked. Curiosity has killed a lot of cats in its day, but it’s left the pioneer folk for the most part alive.

  Her gun speaks three more times before the ship is a graveyard. She steps away and scans the skies. There’s never just one. It’s not a battle if you’re shooting at shadows. Finally she sees it, a cloud that moves just a little too quickly, skirting against the wind instead of with it. Cherry’s sigh is a wisp of a thing, heartbroken and tired.

  Earth, again. Why must it always start with Earth?

  Charity Smith is going home.

  N IS FOR NO QUARTER

  “Are you sure, Miss Cherry?” The governor’s voice is an electronic sine wave that caresses the whole room with its vibrations; the governor himself is a Jovian, geneticall
y engineered to thrive in the seas of liquid metallic hydrogen that cover the planet’s surface. He was born on Jupiter and came to Ganymede as a young man, seeking his fortune. He can never go home now. He’s been on this world, in its lighter gravity, for far too long.

  His daughter has been in Cherry’s class, born of a surrogate; he has never touched his more Earth-true wife with his bare hands. It was the governor who recognized Cherry’s name and approved her hiring. He knows as well as any how important such gardeners are to a world just getting started.

  “They saw me, Mr. Galais, and while I’d be just as happy to go back to my class, you and I both know that’s not the way to keep the peace.” She even sounds a little sorry. She likes this world. She likes these kids. “I’ll need my ship and the pay you promised me. In return, I’ll keep the war from your doorsteps, and I’ll only contact you if I need an employment reference.”

  The governor chuckles despite himself. “You’ll have it, rest assured; you’ve done nothing but good here. The children will be devastated.”

  “Tell them this is the cost of war. They should know that well enough already, from our lessons; you’ll just be giving a reminder.” Cherry shakes her head. “I have to go, or someone will come looking. Now. My ship?”

  “Ready at the port. But tell me, Miss Cherry…where will you go? What will you do?”

  Cherry smiles. It’s a thin, wistful expression, broken and beaten down by more years than anyone who’s seen it cares to count. “I’m going home. As for what I’ll do when I get there, well…I suppose I still have a few lessons left to teach. And some folks clearly haven’t been learning.”

  The governor had never considered double-crossing her; there’s looking for a better deal, and then there’s taunting a dog already proven to bite. In his tank of pressurized hydrogen, he shivers and turns, his long fins draping over themselves, and for the first time, he is glad Miss Cherry will be leaving them.