He knew that playing it and pretending to be the sort of warrior/hunter his ancestry might have made of him was dumb. He wasn’t that kind of Indian. Outwardly he might look like a full-blooded Mohawk, but inside he was a mutant his family had somehow produced. Not a sacred creature like a white buffalo, but the human equivalent of a rubber tomahawk or plastic dreamcatcher. Sometimes he wondered if maybe his mother had eaten too many Twinkies or TV dinners when she was carrying him.
He sipped his oolong tea, watching the distant bonfire, watching his own reflection in the perspyl.
He knew better than to romanticize the life his family led. There they were, living on the Rez, keeping themselves apart from a world they could not and would not adapt to. Making part of their living by being living anachronisms, caught in a peculiar temporal eddy that contained both traditional ways and 100-inch Hitachi HDs, wearing feathers in their hair while driving fusion-powered Fords, spearing salmon and sending out for pizza.
By age seven he’d known he didn’t want to spend his life working in a Rezedge casino, or pounding drums, reenacting dances, and hawking baskets to tourists; painting his face and dressing up in the tattered and faded remnants of his tribe’s culture. He wanted to go places, see and do things that had nothing to do with the world into which he’d been born. Teaching stories bored him, SpaceNet was what absorbed his every free moment. The first FTL ships were heading off to find other worlds around other suns! How could he know that and stand to spend his whole life within the same few hundred square miles?
“So here I am,” he whispered to his reflection. “Over 700 light-years from the Rez, and I haven’t touched a drum in years. The youngest BAA Station Chief ever. I’m my own man now.”
Your own man. Using an office and living space provided by the company you’re supposed to be watching, playing games on their cybonics, drinking high-priced that you get tossed like a bone to a dog, making excuses for them, letting yourself—
Joe flinched in surprise when his comm chimed. “Yeah?” he called, hoping it wasn’t another Frank versus Bull bout.
“Joe? It’s Jubal. Have you got a minute?”
“Sure, what’s up?” Joe sat up straighter, glad for the interruption. Jubal Atkins was the site factor, in charge of handling shipping and inventory. A middle-aged, quietly aloof black man who gave classes on fencing and classical guitar in his off hours, he was probably Joe’s closest friend on Marguy. Joe had started out trying to keep from getting too chummy with BCT staff, but five months of lessons and a shared outsider status had created a surprisingly warm friendship. Joe was doing all right with the fencing, but was an absolute disaster as a guitarist. The two men were also the only teetotalers.
“I just got a shuttle load from the Tahiti sorted out, and there’s some stuff here for you. I saw you hadn’t logged off for the night, and figured I’d see if you wanted it sent up.”
Joe glanced at the clock. Nearly midnight, but he couldn’t say he felt much like sleeping. “Sure, that’d be great. I can come down and get it.”
“Stay put. George is here and he’s bringing some other stuff up your way shortly. Figure five minutes. That OK?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“No problem. Jubal out.”
Joe realized there would probably be mail from his family. Maybe that was why he’d been thinking about them, unconsciously knowing he’d be hearing from them soon.
The agency had sent him a cybotic Kube no doubt stuffed with forms, and informed him that he’d gotten a 5 percent raise. The rest of his mail was from his family and pretty much what he’d expected: small talk, bits of gossip, reports on who’d gotten pregnant, married or divorced, tales of that winter’s record-breaking snowfall; dispatches from their insular world. One benefit of his job was that the BAA would bear the cost of shipping small parcels to their agents. His family had taken advantage of this offer. His mother had made and sent a pair of beaded shearling moccasins and a knit sweater far too heavy to ever wear on Marguy. His uncle John had sent a kilo of venison jerky and a kilo of smoked dried salmon. His female cousins had sent StaPax of homemade blackberry and huckleberry jam, a packet of birch gum, and wintergreen leaves and sweetgrass for tea.
The package he left for last was. the one from his grand-father, Samuel Swamp. Grampa Sam had been the one to whom he’d first confessed his desire to do the things he never could if he stayed on the Rez. He had seemed the most likely to understand such feelings since he himself had gone off to take a doctorate in mathematics and spent years teaching at Caltech. Only in his late forties had he returned to his roots, coming back to the Rez, taking over the teaching of math at their own Reservation School and eventually becoming principal.
Grampa Sam had listened soberly to the young Joe pour out his hopes and fears and space-filled dreams. Then he had said that this was a most important matter, one which would take much thought before he could speak to it. He sent Joe home, telling him that he would have his answer in the morning. That night had been an agony for Joe. Samuel Swamp was one of his tribe’s most respected elders. What he decided might as well be law because of the weight everyone else would give it.
When Joe awoke that next morning he found Grampa Sam sitting there beside his bed, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. He told Joe that he had thought long and hard on this matter. He had consulted with his ancestors and sought guidance from the spirits. What they told him led him to spend the rest of the night netrifying, racking up one ball-buster of an infobill.
Joe’s path was clear. He was being Called to be a new sort of warrior. There was a need for him in the wider world outside the Rez, and on the distant worlds as yet unseen. Men were going to these other worlds now, and soon they would be meeting the other Peoples who dwelt on some of them. This was good, and yet implicit in such a meeting was the possibility of great wrongness. Their own people had come in contact with people from another world, and had nearly been destroyed in the process. Some of that came from prejudice, some from greed, some from indifference to the welfare and ways of others, and much of it could have been avoided if only there had been less ignorance on both sides of this collision of worlds.
Worlds were funny things, his grandfather mused. Sometimes they rejected you, sometimes they never let you go, and sometimes they did both. As a young man the world and ways of the Rez had pinched him like a bad shoe, so he had gone into a whole other world off the Rez, and lived in a world within a world called Academia. It was a good place, yet for all the honor he had found there, in the end he had known that it was not really where he belonged. Returning to the Rez he found that it still did not quite fit him either, but it was where he was supposed to be. So he had remained there as one who dwelt between two worlds, with one foot in each. Maintaining your balance in such a position was quite often hard, but it could be done without falling on your ass too often.
This was to be Joe’s lot as well, only in his case the worlds would be literal as well as figurative. There were people out there groping toward the creation of a means to provide people who would act as a buffer between this world and its ways and those of the Other Peoples waiting to be met; to act as spokesman for these far-flung tribes, to be their friend, ally and guardian. Joe’s task was to prepare himself to join this as yet uncreated agency and become a speaker and warrior in these other Peoples’ behalf, a task for which he would have his grandfather’s help.
The BAA had been officially founded when Joe was a junior in high school—first in his class thanks to his grandfather’s tutoring. He applied to join just before finishing his masters degree. Attached to his application had been letters of recommendation from Indian Chiefs and world-renowned physicists, mathematicians and philosophers—again thanks to his grandfather.