Why didn’t the warrior have a better teacher for his own language? I knew the answer, and it didn’t reflect too well on my own family. If you want the honest truth, the evacuation had been my father’s idea — his pet project, planned and executed by him from start to finish.
No one had even considered the possibility of getting the kids out till Dad suggested it to Sam. I actually read the message he sent from New Earth. Sam was supposed to take credit for the notion, so she could win brownie points with grateful parents on Troyen… but it was Dad who organized the big navy airlift to ferry youngsters to the nearest safe planet.
"Just a temporary thing," Sam told me. I was sick in the palace infirmary by then, with a big isolation room all to myself. Humans weren’t supposed to visit unless they wore rubbery orange isolation suits, but Sam never followed the rules. She’d handpicked my doctors and nurses; they let her do whatever she wanted, almost as if she were an honorary queen. So she held my hand like she couldn’t possibly catch Coughing Jaundice herself, and she said, "The evacuation is only for a few weeks. Till I get the situation here back under control. Dad made a lot of important friends when he was a bright young diplomat on Troyen; now he’s keen to keep them happy. If a few Mandasar nobles want to send their kids to safety, Dad’s glad to arrange it."
Don’t ask me how helping a few friends turned into the full-scale removal of ten million young Mandasars; but things have a way of snowballing. When word gets out rich and powerful people want their kids offplanet, folks who aren’t so well heeled start clamoring for the same thing. Dad refused to take any adults — just a bare minimum of Mandasar nursemaids — but he found a place for every child who was brought to the transport depots.
When anyone asked who’d look after the kids, Dad promised he was sending "trained caregivers" to Celestia. "What a scam!" my sister had said, rolling her eyes. "People on Celestia will never know what hit them. The thing is, Edward, Celestia is an independent world sitting right in the path of Technocracy expansion. They’re undeveloped and underpopulated, not to mention their environment is nicely compatible with Terran life. Everyone knows the planet is a juicy prize the Technocracy wants to scoop up… and the Celestian government is sweating its tits off, trying to attract nonhuman immigrants to fill up all that inviting empty space."
Sam laughed. "At this very second, folks on Celestia are congratulating themselves how lucky they are to get ten million Mandasars. Warm bodies to add to the census so they can tell the Technocracy, ‘Hey, you can’t take us over, we’ve got a thriving population here.’ What the Celestians don’t understand is that the ten million kids are going to get twenty million humans to take care of them… courtesy of the High Council of Admirals. Celestia will find itself inundated with Homo sap guardians, and if anyone complains to the League, we’ll say we’re only acting from compassion for the poor wee lobsters."
"But," I said, "if the kids are only going to Celestia for a few weeks…"
"When the kids go home," Sam replied, "the baby-sitters will stay. What can Celestia do? It’s one thing to run off a few dozen squatters… but not twenty million. Especially not twenty million cranky pioneers who’ve been waiting impatiently for land of their own. This time next week, Celestia will be a de facto human settlement, answering only to Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold. Colonization by fait accompli."
So the people supposed to tend the kids weren’t trained caregivers at all; they were a bunch of get-rich-quickers who’d been waiting for colony homes to open up anywhere in frontier space. I guess they had visions of marching down to Celestia and owning the place within a year, while the current nonhuman inhabitants got shunted into reservations and scut jobs. Most of the would-be land-grabbers had no idea how hard they’d have to work to establish any kind of homestead… and they definitely didn’t have a clue how to raise Mandasar hatchlings.
That wouldn’t have mattered much if the children had really only stayed a few weeks. But then the war broke out full bloom back on Troyen and the Technocracy pronounced a quarantine: Troyen was off-limits, nobody in or out. The kids on Celestia couldn’t go home; they couldn’t even get teachers of their own species, except for the tiny number of Mandasars who’d been offplanet when Troyen fell under blockade.
I can imagine my dad cursing a blue streak about the situation. He’d taken responsibility for the kids, and now he had no choice but to raise them. Somehow. Even if it cut into the "colonization and settlement fees" he’d collected from those Celestia homesteaders. Worse than that, the Admiralty demanded he educate the Mandasar kids in their own history and geography and all; otherwise, civilians would go crazy, throwing around words like "imperialism" and "oppression" and "cultural genocide." Still cursing, my father put out a call for people who knew anything at all about Troyen, so they could teach Mandasar children about themselves.
Ten million kids need an awful lot of teachers. Dad couldn’t find nearly enough people who actually knew what they were talking about; up till the war, no one in the Technocracy paid much attention to Troyen. So the kids had had to get by with folks who didn’t know as much about hive culture as they pretended: who’d learned from books or ten-day tourist visits. Twenty years later, all that ignorance showed — I was no Troyen expert, but I’d spent fifteen years there with the diplomatic mission, plus another twenty years watching from the moonbase. I knew the difference between a decent accent, and one that sounded like a toddler with his mouth full of porridge.
"My name’s Edward," I said, deciding it was safer to speak English rather than Mandasar. "I don’t mean any trouble to you or your hive. It’s just…" I stopped and waved at the evac module, still floating calmly in the canal behind us. "There was trouble with my ship. Up in space. And the escape pod just happened to land here."
"Am Zeeleepull, I," the warrior answered. Zeeleepull was a Mandasar word meaning "dauntless" and "undefeated" and "stubborn"… a really popular birth name for warriors. He looked glumly at the escape pod for a few seconds, then asked, "More humes will come? Navy humes to find and reclaim you?"
"I guess so. Maybe."
The pod’s onboard computer was surely broadcasting "Come and get me" on the fleet’s emergency band. Jacaranda and Starbase Iris might have their hands full dealing with the black ship, but when they got free time they’d send someone to make a pickup. I wondered if they’d bother to search for me; none of Willow’s other evac modules had anyone inside, so the retrieval team might think this one had been empty too. Maybe the retrieval team would just load up the pod and leave, without asking anyone questions.
I could always hope.
So far, Zeeleepull and his hive-mates were the only ones who knew I was here. If I got out of sight before other people came out from siesta… and if I could persuade these Mandasar kids not to tell the navy they’d seen me… "Um," I said to Zeeleepull. "Could I maybe talk to your family a minute? Inside, in private somewhere?"
He gave me a mistrustful look. At least, I think that’s what it was; on Troyen, I’d got the hang of reading Mandasar facial expressions, but I was twenty years out of practice. Zeeleepull stared at me a few more seconds, his breathing all huffy and puffy. Then, he turned away and headed for home, muttering over his shoulder, "Come then, you stinky hume."