“Well,” Kael said, regarding them as calmly as he could, “what did you all think of that?”
Dead silence.
“Angelo?”
“The kids that done it will get expelled, won’t they, sensei?”
“If they’re caught. Do you think they ought to be expelled, Angelo?”
“Aw yeah!”
“Why, Angelo?”
“Well, they want to destroy Curringal, don’t they, sensei?”
“Who else thinks that the people who programmed the holly want to destroy Curringal?”
A confused general babble, and some revived tittering. “It didn’t show respect, did it, sensei?”
“No, Helee, whatever else it did, it didn’t show respect.”
“Well, they should of, even if they don’t agree with Mr. Grey and that.”
“Do you think they’ll get caught, sensei?”
The whole class started to talk at once. Their confused fright was turning back into animation. Noise level rose sharply; Kael tried for some semblance of order.
“Look, do you think we ought to have a class debate about this?”
A couple of dozen voices: “Yes.”
“No.” Janelle in the front row.
“Don’t you think it was important, Janelle?”
“This is meant to be a history search, sensei.”
“Don’t you think this has something to do with history?”
“There won’t be a question on it in the exam, will there?”
“Oh dry up, you old bag. Don’t listen to her, we want a debate.”
“Sit down, Oni, Janelle has a right to her opinion and this is meant to be a search on galactic monetary development.”
“Well, she can go and read her library if that’s all she cares about.”
“Don’t get so excited, Oni. If most of you want a debate there’s no reason why those who don’t can’t go and work by themselves on a library. Who apart from Janelle doesn’t want a debate?”
Silence.
Janelle grabbed up her library and made a rush for the door.
“She’s just like that, sensei, a real goody-goody. All she thinks about is passing exams.”
“All right, all right, you lot. It took Janelle more courage to be the odd-one-out than most of you’ve got.” Kael listened with amazement to his own sententious phrase—the real educer’s touch. “Right, now who’s going to be chair?”
“You, sensei.”
“No, one of you lot will have to be, I’m tired of doing all the work around here.”
As Kael was about to vacate his place in favor of Jo, the appointed chair, the door opened and Janelle scuttled to him. “What is it, Janelle, do you want to come back to the debate?”
The girl mumbled something; she looked steadfastly at her feet and twisted her library. The class offered a number of derisive opinions. Kael ignored them, concentrating on Janelle. “What’s the matter, dear?”
Again the child said something inaudible and continued to twist the machine in her red, sweaty fingers. Kael realized she was close to tears. Had the obscenity shaken her this badly? It might be better to cancel the debate.
He led her into the corridor and shut the door. Contemptuous comments penetrated to the echoing space stretching away to either side of them. “Now, what’s the matter?”
“Need permission.” The girl choked back a sob.
Hell, it’d be hopeless dragging her back in now, the others’d never settle down to a lesson, they’d take it out on her later. Kael pulled out his library and punched through authorization for the girl to use the big full access libraries at a time other than that specified by the time-table.
Janelle sniffled something that might have been, “Thanks,” and hurried down the corridor. Could he have said anything to cheer her up? He returned to the class. Jo was sitting at Kael’s station.
“Well, haven’t you started yet?”
“We were waiting for you, sensei.”
“What the hell for? You’re chair, aren’t you?”
Kael walked to the back of the class and eased himself behind Jo’s console. She shouted for order. “Right, now I want someone to speak in favor of what we saw.”
Silence, then whispering. Muttered entreaties filled the room. Kael wondered why the authorities hadn’t appeared yet on the holo with a counterblast. Presumably Con and his mad friends had contrived to lay the system waste behind them.
“You speak.”
“No, you.”
“Tell Oni to.”
All faces finally turned to Oni, child of a space-freighter crew; she rose to take her rightful place as rebel and general stirrer.
“Well, I think this is the best thing that’s happened at Curringal since the time they tried to burn the commissary down.”
“That was an accident, you dill.”
“How would you know, you little twat?”
Jo banged Kael’s master console. “Stick to the point, Oni.”
“Well, I’m fed up with being told what to do all the time. Being told my hair isn’t the right color by old Hewson. What does it matter to her what color my hair is? You never tell anybody off about their hair, do you, sensei? Well, what that program said is that people like Mr. Grey and Madam Hewson shouldn’t be educers unless they can mind their own business. They won’t let you leave the grounds at luncheon to buy eggs and chips, no, you’ve got to stay and go to the commissary where there’s only a millionth of a centimeter of marg on the rolls—”
“What’s that got to do with old Grey farting all the time?”
In the ensuing uproar, Jo struggled to get order. “Sit down, Oni, you’ve said enough to start off ‘In Favor’. And you shut up, Angelo, that was just a simulation, it wasn’t real farting, I bet he never does. Order! Order! Tell ‘em all to shut up, sensei.”
Laughing, Kael said: “Quiet, the lot of you. If we’re going to have a debate, you’ve got to listen to the speakers and do as the chair says. Okay, Jo.”
“Right, now who’s going to say something against the program. Helee?”
“Well, I think it’s disgusting and I hope the kids who did it get arrested for treason.”
“You would.”
Jo waxed authoritative: “Shut up, Oni, you’ve had your go.”
“What it showed Mr. Grey doing was real rude and he never would. Anyway he’s co-ordinator, so he must be real good at his job, otherwise he’d just be an ordinary educer.”
The class cringed in various degrees at this eulogy, but no one interrupted. Oni appeared now to be absorbed in study, a rare phenomenon. Helee rushed on: “And as for all that stuff about Kurd and everything, well, what’s that got to do with getting your inlays? If the kids that did that don’t even care if we get invaded one day, well, that’s got nothing—”
“Please sensei, he’s coming.”
Imon squinted through a hole from his lookout post on the row of consoles next to the corridor.
“Who’s coming, Imon?”
“Mr. Grey, sensei.”
Strike me pink, a visitation in the flesh. Kael looked at his class; they were completely mute. Jo leapt to vacate the seat of power.
“I think we’d better have a proper program, sensei.”
“Yes, sensei, Mr. Grey would be real mad. Like it said on the holly, you’re not allowed to discuss controversial topics.”
With a sigh, audible to all his tongue-tied pupils, Kael handed Jo’s desk back and walked to the front of the room, taking his rightful place in the scheme of things. He looked at the class; the class looked at him.
“Well, while we’re waiting let’s talk about the fiscal exchange of eidetic data-blocks as a basis for—”
The gray man entered. The class got quickly to its feet. Kael rose very slowly to his. There were no salutations.
“Sit down, 3C, Mr. Ponchard. The public outrage of a few minutes ago calls for immediate action. I presume it was received on the class projector, and that you were unable
to turn it off?” Kael nodded. Turn it off? Never occurred to me, mate, not in a million years. “I don’t think any members of your class were directly concerned, it is doubtless the work of the overgrown louts and hussies in pre-graduate. I expect all of you unwittingly witnessed some of that vile performance. First, let me make perfectly clear that those responsible will be severely dealt with. I trust that none of you needs to be told that the entire exhibition was a vile concoction....”
Kael stood slightly behind the gray man and listened to the practised anger of a century or more, climbing to a parody of the parody.
Grey neck rose, faintly flushing, from gray ruff to the rigidly defined line of fake gray hair. Well, if the whole bloody incident has done nothing but prove the bugger a mammal rather than a mutated reptile something has been achieved.
Kael looked at his pupils: thirty-five stolid recipients of this authentic bit of emotion, seventy eyes fixed on the gray man but not, it would seem, on his face. If telekinesis was a fact they’d drill a hole through his sternum.
Kael suddenly felt the absurdity of the whole situation. Here I stand behind the back of this ranting lunatic, with a serious expression on my face, befitting the gravity of the matter in hand. The iron-gray General and his loyal aide-de-camp. Suppose I were to do a little soft-shoe, stand on my hands, thumb my nose at the back of old grayness, pull down my own pants, fart a couple of times?
An involuntary smile crossed Kael’s face. He caught himself and repressed it.
What if I were to bond a notice saying “Do Not Feed The Reptile” to his back and send him off so labeled to wind up his voyage of retribution? Or a holo patch showing a foaming dog.
The desire to laugh got worse. He broke into a quick grin. He set the muscles of his face and stifled a giggle in his throat. He glanced at his charges but they were all looking at the gray man.
Suppose I were to tap him on the shoulder and inform him that I was making a citizen’s arrest under the suppression of rabid dogs act?
Kael caught Oni’s eye. She, too, was fighting an internal battle. A companion in this sort of fight is the last thing you want. He turned his back, abandoning Oni to her own struggle.
The gray words were building to a climax:
“...be certain of one thing, if there is a recurrence of this disgraceful incident the whole student body will suffer. So it is in your own interests that whoever is responsible is brought to light. Thank you, Mr. Ponchard, I regret the need to have interrupted your program like this.”
Kael turned just in time to meet the gray man’s eyes as he left the room. “Not at all, Mr. Grey.”
The door shut.
From the back of the room Oni’s giggle ran cleanly through the silence.
“That will do, Oni, just calm down and stop....”
Oni put her head on her console and howled. Someone said in a high squeaky voice, “With his pants down.” Kael’s minimal defenses collapsed. He abandoned himself. Out of control, he found himself roaring and weeping with laughter. His diaphragm hurt and his eyes were awash with tears. Beyond his own laughing came the gale and then the hurricane of the kids’ mirth.
§
Catsize looked incredulously at Mr. Smeeth.
“But didn’t you tell this Inspector-General chappie about my size? I’m too frail for manual work.”
“He thinks you’re qualified for an office library.”
“An office! But I’m a poet. Poets die in offices. Ruth can’t save them, they wilt, they wither, and then they die. Pitiful it is, pitiful. I’ve seen it often through the centuries.”
“He also talked to Schafschank about you.”
“The fiend!”
“Keep your voice down. The Medbank dumped its high core and they traced it to your file. It seems you’ve been suffering from diseases extinct for millennia.”
“It’s me age! A wreck of a man right from the word go, and I mean the day J. Peter White skidded through a cow turd into the first Aorist Closure. I’ve been eaten by cancers, tumors, ague, pox, fever—”
“All right, all right, keep your voice down.”
“And they want to condemn me to die in some hell hole of invoices and dear person re yours of the thirty-first instant it has come to our computer’s attention that notwithstanding your update sincerely yours department of sprocket tighteners. Have they no shame! no soul, no—”
Aghast, Smeeth implored the ruined poet. “Look, just do me a favor, will you? just go along to these people and give them a try, just so as I can have it on my records that you’ve had a go—”
“You don’t understand. I’m at a very crucial point in my art, I’m preparing a poem to welcome the Imperial Legation. This might be my chance to obtain sponsorship from the Court.”
“I didn’t know that!” Smeeth was impressed. He activated Catsize’s file readout and searched the bright lines. “But it says nothing here about an official parliamentary invitation to—”
“No, it’s sort of a freelance thing, you know, the spirit of Victoria speaks up from the crowd of petitioners.”
Smeeth pulled at his chin. “Look, there’s no real problem, you won’t have to start your duties for a couple of weeks, and they probably won’t take you anyway, and even if they do there’ll be plenty of time to write poetry between the tea breaks. If the Legates are impressed by your poem you’ll be all right anyway, and if not—though I’m sure they will be—you can get yourself fired after a year or two and come back and see me.”
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
“I’ve read that poem too.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Smeeth, you’ve only vid the cartoon.”
§
Kael and Anla stepped from the staff slide into an afternoon ablaze with noon light. Kael squinted, shielding his eyes with his library.
Efficient youths in earpads strode the lava between Curringal’s trizzy dodecahedrons. Laser mirrors scorched from the roofs of media skites, nodding on their swivels like rows of roosting Phoenix birds.
Anla turned her head aside as someone aimed a big pickup at them.
“Not a word, Kael,” she muttered. “What are these bastards doing here anyway, they’ll never get permission to ‘cast a report on this.”
A smooth-voiced, beautiful woman stood in front of them. “Hello, you’re educers from Middle Inlay, aren’t you? You have any comments on this morning’s extraordinary events?”
Anla tightened her mouth and pushed past. Kael saw flustered Madam Hewson, corralled a few meters away, open hers and say, “It was disgusting and I hope those who were responsible are expelled and convicted.” He looked back at the media.
“Sorry love, we’re just cleaners, must rush now.”
“But aren’t you Sensei Kael Ponchard, a first-year novice educer?”
Kael stared at her. “How the hell do you know who I am? We’ve never met have we?”
“Isn’t it true that you gave permission to the culprits to use the facilities here in programming their attack on the Co-ordinator?”
Flabbergasted, Kael said: “The culprits?”
“At this moment a group of sub-graduates led by Con Ephores is being interrogated by the Co-ordinator and members of the planetary militia. Do you deny your implication in their actions?”
In the shadow of the gathering crowd of support techs, Kael suddenly made out the red face of the girl proctor. She looked away and scuttled off with her tugging friends. Anla stood beyond the ring of recording equipment; she jerked her head at him imperatively.
A dizzying sense of absolute freedom gusted through Kael’s body; he was light-headed, yet totally aware of every texture touching his skin, of the cold wind, the shafts of perfect light. Before he could speak burly Olp Scrancher was at his side, gesturing angrily at the media.
“Get out of here, you’re trespassing on Departmental territory. Go on, woman, move your equipment, on the double.”
Kael found himself plucked i
nto shadow. Scrancher told him: “Come and have a buzz, old son. It’s been a hectic day for all of us.” He looked sideways at Kael. “For a moment there I thought you were going to stick up publicly for those louts. They’ll be sent down in disgrace, you know, they’ll be doing manual work for the rest of eternity.”
Intoxicated in the chilly breeze, Kael laughed. “That’ll make little Helee Horkins in 3C happy.”
“Kael, my friend.” Scrancher stopped in front of his skite and regarded him sadly, “Kael, lad, you haven’t been discussing this thing with the kids, have you?”
“Of course. We had a debate about it—”
“You mean they saw the entire production? You didn’t send them out of the classroom?”
“Olp, if Con and his friends are going to be sent down they deserved an audience for their pains at least.”
“I see. You watched it with the kids, and then you sat down with them and had a heart to heart discussion about whether Sam Grey is actually a psychotic power maniac.” Olp shook his head in sorrowful disbelief.
“Well, we started to, the kids broke it off when they heard the old man doing his rounds.”
“At least somebody’s got some sense.”
They climbed into the skite. Catsize’s borrowed vehicle, Anla at the controls, had already gone.
“You may have knackered yourself, old son,” Olp told him. The skite lifted. “Now what was all that crap about you ‘being implicated’?”
§
The soap-opera came to what was presumably meant to be a cliff-hanging end for the night. Ben threw himself into a chair and hollered: “News coming up”. Theri entered the Griffith living room with a tray of coffee mugs, handed them around and sat silently on the floor at Kael’s feet, leaning her head against his knee. Catsize was out for the night, perhaps getting stoned off his skull. He’d left a note announcing Smeeth’s apostasy and his own conversion to Entropic Shaitanism.
“And now the alarming story of Con Ephores, the Bolte child who was suspended from Basic Inlay late this afternoon along with five fellow sub-graduates. Ephores masterminded what authorities dub ‘a seditious and obscene provocation, critical of education in particular and Imperial society in general’.”
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