Ofelia looked at Bluecloak, at the other humans, at Gurgle-click-cough, and finally at Likisi and the small creature writhing in his grasp. Slowly—her joints would not have it any other way—she lowered herself to the floor and started crawling toward him.
“That’s better,” he said. “It’s people like you who cause all the trouble anyway . . . they should never have taught you to read.”
Let him talk, the new voice said, coming out of its hiding. When he is talking, he is not listening. Or thinking. It was hard enough to crawl; she hadn’t crawled in years, what with her knees and her hip, and now her shoulders added to the pains.
“Faster!” Likisi said, but anyone could see that an old woman couldn’t crawl very fast at the best of times, and this old woman was clumsier than most. She glanced up to apologize, and saw his foot drawn back to kick, kicking . . . and Ofelia grabbed his foot and yanked. She was not strong enough to pull him over, but in that shift of weight he loosened his grip on the baby, which squirmed around and sank its small but very sharp teeth into the skin between his thumb and fingers, at the same moment its long sharp toes got a purchase on his arm, and raked hard. “OW!” he yelled, reflex opening his hand; the baby dropped away with a triumphant squeak, and four blurs past Ofelia’s head became four long knives in Likisi’s body.
She crouched there for an unknowable time while others moved around her, and Likisi’s pain ended in a quick slice of his throat. Then it was softness and warmth, and friendly voices, someone carrying her back to her own house, her own bed, the smell of the food she had cooked . . .
She was in her own bed, wrapped in a blanket, with the babies—all three of them—curled along her side. Bluecloak stood at the left side of the bed; the humans—Kira and Ori pale but calm, Bilong sobbing—stood at the foot of the bed, and the other People crowded behind them. She did not know how long it had been, or what else had happened; the smell of Likisi’s death pinched her nose.
Gurgle-click-cough brought her a glass of cold water; she sipped it and the confusion in her mind settled back into recognizable shapes. She was safe. The babies were safe. Everyone was safe but Likisi, and he had been the only one to threaten the children.
If anyone had to die, that was the right one.
Before the armed men took alarm—long before midnight, that is—Ori had agreed to accept reality; he and Kira went back to explain what had happened (Likisi had “gone ballistic” and threatened one of the babies and Ofelia; the creatures had naturally defended them). Bilong played the role of grieving lover almost too well; Ofelia began to wonder if she really believed all she said about Likisi, if those sobs were genuine.
By the time the advisors appeared, armed and dangerous, the apparatus had all been tidied away. Likisi’s body, Ofelia supposed, still sprawled in its blood on the schoolroom floor, but she didn’t have to see it. The advisors could see her bruises, and the marks on the baby’s throat; they could see that Ori was well-satisfied with what had happened.
“Idiot,” one of them said, in the front room of Ofelia’s house, where they came to interview the team members. Not that they had any authority to do so, Kira muttered to Ofelia, while waiting her turn. Likisi had had the civilian authority, and now it passed to her, as assistant team leader, but it was as well not to upset them. “Idiot,” the man went on. It was the loud one. “Old Bossyboots never did have the sense—”
“May I touch one?” Kira asked, her face gentler now as she peered at the sleeping babies. “Yes,” Ofelia said. “They like to be stroked here—” She demonstrated; Kira copied her, and the baby opened bright eyes, swiped Kira’s hand with its tongue, and went back to sleep. “Cute is the wrong word,” Kira said. “But—”
“There isn’t a word,” Ofelia said, “because they’re not human. They need their own words.”
“Bilong—”
“Bilong,” Ofelia said, more tartly than she meant, “is a fool. She may or may not know anything in her own field, but in person—”
Kira grinned down at her. “I thought a woman like you would like someone like her better . . . she’s more traditional . . .”
“Go read my log notes on Linda,” Ofelia said. The baby had liked Kira; she would not have chosen her, but the baby had. So she might as well learn to like Kira herself. Kira was smarter than Rosara; maybe she could be retrained into a reasonable sort of daughter. “And do not miss your chance when Bilong quits making such a loud noise about Likisi and notices that Ori is still here.”
Kira flushed. “What do you mean? I’m not—”
Ofelia stopped her with a look. “I am an old woman, but I am not stupid, or a fool. You like this Ori—”
“Well, yes, but not like that—”
“He wants to stay. You will stay. You will like him enough to become a mother. You already do; it’s why you hate Bilong.” Wicked, wicked glee, to see that strong-minded woman’s jaw drop as if she’d been hit with a brick. Wicked pleasure bubbling in her veins to see that woman discover that she had been seen, that her mind had been as naked to an old woman’s knowledge of human nature as the old woman’s body had been to her external eye.
Ofelia lay back, watching Kira through the hedge of her eyelashes. “You will call me Sera Ofelia,” she said. “You will help me with these babies, and the next, and you will have a click-kaw-keerrr for your own.”
“But—but—” She did not look so formidable when she sputtered like that, but she did look beautiful with the color of outrage on her cheeks.
“Good night,” Ofelia said, and shut her eyes. After awhile, she felt the mattress shift as Kira stood up, heard the whispers on the far side of the room. The babies squirmed contentedly all along her body, and she went to sleep.
The formal duties of nest-guardianship lay lightly on Ofelia; she spent the early mornings in her garden, with the babies scampering around beneath the great frilled leaves of squash vines grabbing slimerods. Later in the morning, she took them over to the center, where they joined the elders in the schoolroom. Unlike the People’s own nest-guardians, she had help from other elders; they understood that she alone could not keep up with three active babies. When she needed a nap, someone was always there . . . and sometimes that someone was Kira or Ori, who had both elected to stay as her human assistants.
If it was not quite as free a life as her solitary existence, it was in other ways more satisfying. What she had least liked about community life had vanished. No one told her what to do; no one told her she didn’t matter. Even the old voice finally died away, frustrated by her lack of response.
She still got a wicked thrill from speaking into the special communications link that carried her voice (she was told) instantly to the government buildings back on the world she had not thought of as home for decades. Back there, where she had been born, and lived, in the obscurity of a crowded inner city tenement, back where she had been told what she could not learn, the men who made laws listened to her. They could not even tell her to be quiet, because the link was only one way at a time. First she would give her report, and days later a batch transmission would come back for her.
She let Kira and Ori listen to it first. They felt more important, and she felt sheltered a little from the tone of the first transmissions, before they realized they had no possible way to control her. They were past panic then, enjoying each other too much, enjoying the company of the bright, endlessly curious People who came to visit.
Profile, The Journal of Political Science.
The human ambassador to the first nonhuman intelligence encountered in Man’s inexorable advance across the stars is a short, gray-haired, barefooted old woman without a single qualification for the position . . . except that the aliens like her. Born Ofelia Damareux, in the working-class neighborhood of South Rock, Porter City, on Esclanz, Sera Ofelia Falfurrias now holds the most prestigious—and some say the most perilous—diplomatic post in the history of mankind. What kind of government would put an amateur—no, not even an amateur, a co
mplete nonentity—in this post?
To answer that question, we interviewed the Director of Colonial Affairs. “In my opinion,” Ser Andreys Valpraiz said, “it was a major blunder. My predecessor, appointed by the previous administration, lacked the decisiveness to intervene in what was, admittedly, a confusing situation in which the designated contact had apparently become mentally unbalanced and died following an attempt to assault one of the native species. I inherited this mess. At least I have ensured the proper replacement for Sera Falfurrias, a professional with the right credentials, with a clear understanding of the needs of both peoples. We’ll have no more of this sentimental ‘nest-guardian’ nonsense when the next ambassador is appointed . . . and of course Sera Falfurrias is quite elderly . . .”
Charlotte Gathers peered at the thick silvery envelope suspiciously. “Silver Century Tours announces a Free Vacation Prize Package for senior ladies.” She opened it, to find an application for the prize drawing. She was old enough, yes, and she had children and grandchildren. Was she willing to take a long voyage? Yes, after that last miserable holiday week at the coast, when her daughters made it clear just how much they resented having to pay for the two-bedroom apartment. They were so selfish—and after all she’d done for them! Possibilities for emigration? She checked the “yes” box. Maybe things would be better on the outer worlds. She had seen something on a news show about a planet where a little old lady was the ambassador. For a moment she imagined herself as an ambassador to an alien race, but on the whole she didn’t like odd smells and funny accents. Perhaps not an ambassador, but an ambassador’s friend . . . someone to lunch with, to play cards with . . . if she could just get away to someplace exotic, and show her daughters that she didn’t need them.
Charlotte Gathers did not pass the screening for nest-guardian: one look at her sour face and beady eyes, and the polite young woman told her she had won the minor prize of a week at White Spring Resort. Others made it past the receptionist to the real screening committee, and some of these emigrated to become nest-guardians, their passage paid by profits on the inventions of a very inventive People.
Slowly, the village filled again. Now people lived in more than half the cottages. Gray-and-white-haired nest-guardians with striped nestlings, pale nest-guardians of the People with the slower-growing children of the humans who had moved here—Kira and Ori’s children, for instance, who had learned the People’s language from birth. Most mornings Ofelia woke to the sound of voices in the lane, People and human both. She had begun sleeping later, these last few years; she rarely saw sunrise these days. Gurgle-click-cough’s first nesting had grown out of their bold stripes, and into the hunting pattern; they were no longer her responsibility. She had been intrigued to find that their tails and the loud stripes disappeared at the same rate. As with humans, they were least appealing in an awkward intermediate stage, when their tails were stubby stumps no longer capable of twining around things, and their stripes looked faded and dingy.
One of them hunted ideas more than game; it had helped build the first flying machine designed by the People. Ofelia heard that all the cities on the stone coast had electricity now, and even the nomadic tribes had small computers running off batteries whose fuel was now being grown for that purpose. She didn’t understand most of it; she spent more time dozing, and less time teaching.
She wasn’t worried. She did sometimes wonder which version of her life Barto and Rosara would hear when they wakened from cryo thirty years hence, far away. Would they be told she’d died in transit . . . or would they know she had stayed behind and become famous? It was a good joke either way, and while she did not, as she had once planned, die alone, she did die smiling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH MOON is a native Texan who grew up two hundred and fifty miles south of San Antonio. After earning a degree in history from Rice University, she spent three years in the Marine Corps, then earned a degree in biology from the University of Texas, Austin. She is intimately acquainted with autism, through the raising of an autistic son, now a teenager. The author of a number of previous novels, including the Hugo Award finalist Remnant Population, she lives in Florence, Texas.
Visit the author’s Web site at
www.sff.net/people/Elizabeth.Moon
Also by Elizabeth Moon
THE SPEED OF DARK
TRADING IN DANGER
Published by Ballantine Books
PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH MOON
HERIS SERRANO
“Dazzling . . . The characters spring to life on the page. . . . The action never flags. . . . Riveting.”
—Booklist
“Excellent world building and appealing characters.”
—Science Fiction Age
AGAINST THE ODDS
“Readers will delight in the twisting, thorny adventure in the compelling continuation to this popular series.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fun, fast-paced mix of space and soap opera.”
—Locus
CHANGE OF COMMAND
“Fans will relish the clever intrigue, the outstanding characterization, and a perfectly applied dash of humor.”
—Romantic Times
“Political intrigue, mutiny in space, and ideological battles of war and weapons lend variety to this fast-moving space opera set in the distant future.”
—Library Journal
Remnant Population is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1996 by Elizabeth Moon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Baen Publishing Enterprises in 1996.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
The Library of Congress Control Number: 2003093358
eISBN: 978-0-345-46220-6
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