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 complete 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