"Misfit?" said yos'Senchul experimentally. "Misfit. What a useful word."
Theo looked hard into his face, but he was apparently serious, as he tried to form the word with his fingers at the same time.
Veradantha tapped the table briefly for attention.
"What we would like you to consider, Theo Waitley, is this idea. This semester is well in progress, and your schedules should not be altered yet again. Go to classes, take time for these clubs and activities."
She paused, tapping on the desk quietly, nodding to herself before going on.
"It is not that you need to be popular, but that you need to watch others, to learn to be less, let us say, strident. To be easy with other people. Speak with me again soon—I will send an appointment to you—and then we will craft for you a schedule allowing a less general curriculum. You will be wishing to take these courses: advanced trade language, the cultural diversity cluster, and . . ."
Chaos, she was tired! Theo shook her head, and spoke before she meant to.
"I am not ignorant. My father teaches cultural genetics, and he hosts students; I've been—"
HOLD!
yos'Senchul rose, and bowed very slightly, signing day of many parts, this over soon.
He continued aloud, with a casual if I may signed toward Veradantha.
"What we seek is to be certain you will be adequately prepared for the sophonts who are not prepared for you. Dance will help, as will more language training, and something—we shall discuss and refine these points, all of us when we have a day less busy around us—something so that you do not present as quite so busy, quite so much on the verge of taking action, at all times."
Veradantha broke in then, with some energy.
"We wish to also remove you from petty local politics as much as we may. Now some, like the excellent Mr. Frosher, they have the way of it. He will be an adequate pilot, I am sure, but he has a path in mind, one that involves administration, one that is also likely to be local. It is not surprising he came so close to the edge of things, and it is not entirely surprising that he has survived this error, and grown from it. Eventually he may grow to be a functionary of some merit.
"But you—you—do not wish to study the tables of dead grandfathers, nor to be liable for not knowing them. This altercation with Wilsmyth is built partly of history you do not know, and assumptions he does not realize he carries. This is what we wish to minimize for you. And for the academy, too.
"With your consent we shall construct for you an independent study option. I suggest a goal as an outworlds pilot. We may fine-tune as we proceed and details become clarified. You will need to study ships, but start tomorrow and not tonight. You will need some more languages—start tomorrow and not this night. We shall also see what we might find on-world for your off-time between semesters, unless you will wish to return to Delgado . . ."
Theo saw the quirking of the mouth for what it was and managed a laugh and a quick sign abort that launch.
Despite herself, she yawned.
Preliminary accept, she signed. She stood and bowed to them both, the very best bow she could muster.
"We have started tonight," she suggested. "We will start more tomorrow."
SECOND LEAP
Eighteen
Diverse Cultures Celebration Team
Anlingdin Piloting Academy
DCCT was housed about as far away as it was possible to get from the rest of the campus and still be in the residential zone; that was her destination after her last scheduled class for the school week.
Theo walked instead of taking the shuttle, sure that some of her classmates were letting the ease of a quick ride stifle their need to move. How they could expect to keep reaction time up while being sluggards was beyond her.
She'd had defensive dance early, which was a good thing. She'd waked a moment before the timer went off, dreaming the ship-route math she'd studied the night before in prep for lab. That had been happening of late, the dreaming about classes, especially math, like she'd finally cleared some cobwebs and gotten to work. The independent study was a good motivator, and she felt almost like she owed Wilsmyth thanks for the now-healed gash on the side of her head.
Another reason she liked this particular walk, besides the fact that it was often deserted, was that it gave a good view of the planes on final approach to the airfield. A few days before she'd seen a really awkward turn-in and approach, while high and away between the field and the mountain a pair of soarplanes rode brilliant in the aqua sky. She had seen a couple of her landings on video and was really glad that none looked as nervous as that one, which had ended more in a series of bounces than a proper landing.
That was the problem, of course—lots of people around the field also saw that landing—and later in the day there was talk of yet another of the local students being sent home before school end. It was eerie the way the school population seemed to be thinning out as the final grading period approached.
Unexpectedly, she heard voices ahead of her where the path rounded a copse of lush red brambleberry. She stepped to the side of the path as a group of fast-moving DCCT members appeared, Kara in the lead.
"Theo, just in time! But you're going the wrong way!"
Kara stopped, bringing the whole team to a crowded halt, familiar faces and unfamiliar together.
Theo signed blankly none there, pointing toward the dorm parapet rising above the trees in the distance.
"Might be, but there's a ship coming in, and we're going to go down to see it."
"There's always a ship coming in . . ." Theo pointed out as a Star King IV obligingly dropping down through the clouds toward the main landing strip.
Theo's hand-sign was flip—overlooked obvious.
"I mean a spaceship." Kara's hand adding new info just in.
"The shuttle is still parked . . ."
A shake of heads, and from the back, a voice she didn't recognize—
"Spaceship. You know, interstellar. We got a call from the field, they thought we might want to see this."
"Here? Where will it fit? What is it?"
"Right. That's what we want to see . . . Come on down with us! DCCT is on the move!"
The Seriously Official Recognized Name of the organization was the Diverse Cultures Celebration Team. Like almost all the other clubs on campus they managed to do something sometime that earned points or competed with other groups or that got them all out at one time cooking and eating foods that they'd never faced at their milk tables, so they got to call themselves a team.
Some of the upperclassmen in the club were part of the DCCT dorm, which had odd floor names and was repainted every few weeks to celebrate this or that significant event in some culture somewhere. The club met there in a permanently assigned room which was certainly furnished in an amalgam one could call diverse, if not outright strange.
Most of the campus just called them the Culture Club, and Theo was feeling oddly comfortable as its newest member. Maybe it had to do with the feeling that no one was actually in charge, except, maybe, sometimes, Kara. It might have had something to do with the tea selection, which was downright amazing. Or it might simply be that compared to the local students, she was as diverse as anybody else.