Damn humans. He was second-guessing himself, wondering if he’d really passed for human as well as he’d thought all these years.
Wondering why it mattered now.
After he handed out the magazines, most of the Courtyard’s guests took their assignments into A Little Bite, where they could use the tables and get a drink.
Alan wandered over to the shelves of children’s books and selected several before he joined Joe and Jackson at A Little Bite. Vlad went upstairs to deal with paperwork. Henry and Bobbie headed for the Market Square shops to see what might be helpful.
That left Simon alone with Charlie.
Going behind the counter, Simon reached for the stack of orders from the terra indigene settlements. If Heather was going to quit, he needed to get a start on these.
“Whispers from across the water,” Charlie said quietly.
Simon began separating the orders into stacks that would go on the same earth native delivery truck. “Whispers of what?”
“War.”
He looked up, giving Charlie his full attention. “War” was a serious word because war reshaped the world. “You think the humans over there are that foolish?”
“Enough of them are.”
“If it does start over there, do you think war will come here?”
“It will touch us. But not, I hope, with the ferocity that will touch the Cel-Romano part of the world.”
“How did you hear about this?”
Charlie smiled. “The Crowgard live in many parts of the world, not just Thaisia. We share what we know. But the Crows can’t tell if the humans will fight to steal territory from each other, as they sometimes do, or if they are looking to take what is ours.”
“I guess the terra indigene over there will find out soon enough and deal with it,” Simon said, frowning as he read the titles being requested from the settlements supplied by the Lakeside Courtyard. It looked like everyone had finished reading the survive-the-blizzard-and-the-evil-human thrillers and had made the seasonal change to stories about surviving other kinds of storms. The evil humans didn’t vary even that much.
Charlie leaned his forearms on the counter. “Simon. This Controller is your enemy, and the Midwest leaders especially are not averse to helping you with this hunt. But that human might not be the only one making the drugs. He might not be the one responsible for the bad meat.”
“He might not be,” Simon agreed. “So that’s one of the things we’ll ask Meg.”
“Meg?” Ruthie asked while Merri Lee opened up the Lakeside and Northeast Region maps on the sorting table. “May I ask you something?”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do today?” Meg replied, setting aside the Lakeside News. “Ask questions in order to find answers?”
Ruthie raised her notebook. “Why would the terra indigene be angry about us taking notes for this assignment? If they’re worried about security or something, we can leave the notebooks here.”
“And everyone in the Courtyard’s Business Association knows Ruthie and Karl are living together and will be getting married this summer and that Michael and I are dating,” Merri Lee said. “At the very least, Simon and Vlad have to figure the police will be aware that something is going on since Ruthie and I were called in to work on Earthday.”
“So why would they be upset about the notebooks?” Ruthie asked. “Because all four of us saw it. The Others in HGR were seriously ticked off, but they didn’t say anything. I know it made Heather and Theral uneasy.”
Meg closed her eyes and recalled training images of notebooks. Appointment books? No, she was pretty sure Simon and Vlad used that kind of notebook to make the work schedule for the store, and Elliot must use one for his meetings with the mayor and such. Journals? No. The Others wouldn’t be upset about such things. Besides, Ruthie and the other girls wouldn’t have brought a journal to a meeting. So what would matter to the terra indigene?
Girls and boys carrying books, going to school, sitting at desks and writing, taking notes while a teacher pointed to something on the blackboard. Then she considered what she knew about the little school here in the Courtyard, about what puppies like Sam were learning and what the juveniles were learning before going off to schools that would give them the technical training or education that was supposed to match what was available to humans. According to the agreements made with the terra indigene in Thaisia, humans could not be taught anything that wasn’t also available to the Others if they wanted to learn.
But what if there were less blatant ways to discourage the Others from insisting that those agreements were met to the full?
She opened her eyes and looked at her friends. “How old were you when you learned to take notes?”
“How old?” Merri Lee frowned. “Before high school. Certainly before going to the university.”
Ruthie nodded. “Not the first few years of school, but definitely before high school. And I’ve always liked keeping track of a project, making notes for myself when I think of something or listing the things I need to do for the assignment, so I started carrying a notebook around since I learned how to write and spell. It’s my way of thinking aloud. And I keep them for reference.”
More images. Boy in the back of the classroom, books closed, sneering at the teacher. Or looking resentful. Or hiding confusion by looking bored? “And if someone doesn’t take notes during class? What would the teacher think?” Meg asked.
“Not interested in the lesson,” Merri Lee replied. “Figures the student thinks the subject is beneath him. Or her.”
“What if no one ever explained to you about taking notes?” Meg asked softly, thinking of how Simon and the other terra indigene she considered friends treated the notebook she used as something private. Which it was. The notebook was her way to build a life, to bridge the gaps between the images she had absorbed during lessons at the compound and the full experience of living. They were curious about why she needed to write things down, but they’d assumed it was part of her being a blood prophet—until this morning when four humans pulled out notebooks and pens and showed the Others that this writing things down wasn’t exclusive to the cassandra sangue. “What if you didn’t learn about taking notes when you were young, so that when you attended classes in a human school, the teacher thought you didn’t care and were wasting his time? What if you wanted to learn but thought the teacher …”
Fetching the copy of the Lakeside News, Meg opened it to the comics and pointed to one strip.
“That strip has been around for years,” Merri Lee said. “When I was young, I thought it was funny, but it doesn’t seem funny anymore.”
One group of characters in the strip always wore elaborate hats, symbols of authority. But the other group, dressed in business suits, were always pulling tricks on the primitives who “couldn’t understand civilization.”
“The Others never learned about taking notes to help them remember what they heard in classes?” Ruthie said. She pressed her lips in a thin line. “Then the instructors would think they’re taking up space in classrooms because they’re entitled to be there but they don’t really care about learning. So the instructors don’t make an effort to find out why the terra indigene aren’t doing the things that would help them get the most out of the class. And the Others realize they aren’t getting what was promised even if they aren’t sure what’s missing, and they resent the humans they still see as intruders even though we’ve been living on this continent with them for centuries.”
“And they express their resentment by tightening the resources we need for the way we live and the things we make, because why should they give up bits of the world that belong to them in order to make things convenient for us?” Merri Lee added. “We all feel a lack, and resentment keeps building. And when the humans go that one step too far …”