by E. M. Foner
“What’s that in the rucksack, Paul?” I inquired.
“Kite string,” he replied, lying bare-faced about the portable laser guidance system he’d obviously smuggled in from off-world. Stacey gave him an admiring look and giggled.
I made a mental note for the next time I was on Library to check whether long periods of radio frequency silence led to insubordination from team members, not that Paul had ever been one for following instructions.
“Try to pay attention for just two seconds,” I said, though it sounded whiny to my own ears, and then I flashed them both an update via infrared.
“Somebody should find Helen,” Stacey suggested. “Paul and I are planning on riding out when the sun sets, so we won’t be available for a meeting later.”
“How about fetching Helen?” I asked Spot, who responded with a yawn. “I’ll cook your favorite dinner.”
This got the dog up and he trotted off in a straight line towards the woods that lined the stream. Too late I saw that Helen was barely fifty yards from us, meaning I had promised to make barbecued ribs in return for the dog taking a short jog. To add insult to injury, he stopped and relieved himself along the way.
Two minutes later, Spot led Helen back to the blanket where she sat on her heels and began rubbing his belly. Then she surprised us all by saying, “I spotted an Original at dawn heading in the direction of the river so I’ve kept an eye on him. He’s been watching you guys all morning.”
“The Originals are watching us?” I asked, feeling strangely indignant about being on the receiving end for a change.
“This one is. Anyway, I was in the line of sight for your last data dump. Even though it was pretty noisy by the time it got to me I’m pretty sure I received all of the important facts. This is a mess.”
“And it’s not even our fault,” Paul added unnecessarily.
“Shouldn’t eBeth and Peter be here?” Sue asked.
“We’re conspicuous enough as it is,” I said, and every direction I turned I saw curious villagers looking away to avoid eye contact. “Alright. No changes to what we decided the other night, but everybody be careful.”
There was another sound of indistinct shouting that even on full gain my hearing couldn’t decipher, but the human repeater system worked as it had previously, and twenty seconds later somebody just a few blankets over cried, “Helen’s pecan pie.”
“I won,” Helen yelled, leaning over and giving the startled dog a hug. “I haven’t won anything other than a bicycle race since we left Earth.”
“We’ll walk over with you,” Stacey offered, standing up and brushing off Paul’s jacket, which she then slipped into. “We both like pie.”
“What’s going on with everybody?” I demanded of my second-in-command. “It’s like the whole team is emulating eBeth and Peter.”
“We’re not that bad,” Sue said, and turned to Kim. “Don’t you and Justin want to get in some quality time by yourselves?”
“Right,” Kim said, and before I could point out that I hadn’t dismissed the meeting, she pulled Justin to his feet and the two sauntered off in the direction of the games. I suspected that our public health expert intended to slip a disinfectant into the apple bobbing basin.
“I know that we aren’t going to resolve anything without more data, but everybody seems to be taking my news pretty lightly,” I complained to Sue. “I’m beginning to think that I’m missing something here.”
“Or forgetting something.” She gave me a look I couldn’t quite categorize.
Sue waited patiently as I racked my short-term memory for anything I might have missed in the conversation, and then I began casting further back, looking for connections to Ferrymen’s Day. Idiot!
“This is for you,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for her present. “I know they must have bigger ones in the provincial capital, but—”
“Oh, Mark,” she cried, and threw herself into my arms. With her face buried in my neck, I could feel the artificial tears flowing down her cheeks. “I’ve waited so long for this. Tell me it means what I think it does.”
“Yes?” I ventured, figuring that my chances of getting it right were much better than fifty-fifty since her question implied that she desired a positive response. I wanted to ask her why she’d never bought a diamond ring herself if she wanted one so much, but I figured I had better wait until she stopped crying. Then the significance of my gift came crashing down, and I swore that I’d get even with eBeth for dragging me into that jewelry store to buy what Sue had obviously taken as an engagement ring.
Seven
“Your dog is weird,” eBeth’s star pupil complained after spending five minutes lying on the floor locked in a stare-down with Spot. “It’s like he’s laughing at us.”
“Maybe it’s just you, Naomi,” a boy from the class suggested. “I’ll bet I can make him look away.”
The children changed places, but Monos didn’t last two minutes. Spot let out a long sigh as if to express how little impressed he was with their efforts.
“Is this really what you guys do for fun?” eBeth asked her students in English. “Who wants to play a game?”
“We are playing a game,” another girl insisted as she took the boy’s place in front of the phlegmatic dog. “Doesn’t he ever blink?”
“That’s an interesting question,” I said, coming around the bar with a pitcher of lemonade into which Sue must have dumped every last granule of sugar we had in The Eatery that hadn’t already gone into cookie and pastry dough. “There are those who say a dog that doesn’t blink is actually a wolf in disguise.”
“He’s making it up,” eBeth reassured her startled students. “We’re not telling ghost stories, Mark. Besides, it’s only lunch time.”
“You call your father by his first name?” Monos asked in astonishment.
“That’s because I’m grown up and I’m mad at him. Naomi, please bring me one of those slates.”
“Are you going to charge us for the lemonade?” a boy asked, pushing away his cup. “I don’t want any now.”
“The slate is for a game. It’s called Hangman.”
“What’s a hangman?”
“A guy who—” eBeth caught herself just in time and improvised on the fly, “—it’s another word for a puppeteer.”
“Oh, because the puppet hangs from strings,” the student surmised. “Are you going to put on a puppet show?”
“I’m going to draw a puppet, but I can only do one string or it will get too confusing,” eBeth told them, and drew a single vertical line down from the top of the slate. “Like that.”
“Can your father give us a real puppet show?” the shortest girl in the class asked, pointing in my direction. “My father can do two Mercurys racing each other, and he even makes their tails wag.”
“My sister has a chicken puppet that can actually pick things up with its beak,” a boy boasted. “She has to use both hands, though.”
“We’ll do that another day,” eBeth said, displaying how well she’d adapted to her role as a teacher. “The way this game works is that I think of a word and you all take turns guessing.”
“Is it educational?” Monos asked suspiciously. “We’re supposed to be on holiday.”
“It’s just a fun game. I’ll make a blank for each letter in the secret word, and when you guess a letter that appears, I’ll put it in the right place. Just to make the game harder, if anybody makes a wrong guess at the whole word, I win and we start over. Oh, and with each wrong guess at a letter, I’ll draw another part of the puppet.”
“What if the letter is in the word twice?” Naomi asked.
“That’s a very good question,” eBeth said, as she drew five dashes on the bottom of the slate. “In that case I’ll fill in the letter everywhere it appears. Let’s do a practice run where the secret word is ‘apple.’ Monos, you go first.”
“Apple!” the boy shouted. “I win.”
The other students all congratulated their fellow on outs
marting the teacher, and eBeth waited patiently for them to get it out of their systems before adding one more blank to the row at the bottom of the slate. “Now, does anybody else want to try?”
“P?” a girl wearing her best holiday clothes guessed.
“Very good, Delphi,” the young teacher said, and put a ‘p’ in the first, third and fourth spaces.
“Puppet,” I blurted, and then retreated hastily behind the bar under eBeth’s glare. “What? I can’t play?”
“No!” the children all shouted together, and then dissolved in laughter at the idea of an adult playing a children’s spelling game. eBeth shook her head over the latest delay, and then erased the bottom of the slate with the side of her hand and drew four new blanks.
“P!” Monos guessed, drawing a new round of admiring laughter, but this time their teacher smiled and drew a circle at the end of the vertical line. As an afterthought, she printed a ‘p’ at the edge of the slate.
“What kind of puppet is that?” a girl asked.
“It’s just the head,” eBeth explained. “If I draw the whole puppet before you guess the word, I win. David?”
“T?”
The teacher put a ‘t’ in the last blank but she didn’t look happy about it. “Harold?”
“Z?”
eBeth gave a wicked grin, drew a vertical line under the circle, and added a ‘z’ to the column on the side.
“Why’d you guess that?” Monos complained to his fellow student. “It’s hardly even a letter.”
“I like Z’s,” Harold defended his choice.
“Delphi?” eBeth prompted before the boys could carry the argument further.
“E,” the girl said confidently. “You told us that it’s the most common letter in Northern.”
“I must have been right,” their teacher groused, putting an ‘e’ in the second blank. “Abimelech?”
“A,” the boy said confidently.
“Miss,” eBeth proclaimed, momentarily confusing Hangman with Battleship in the building excitement. She drew an arm sticking out at an angle before adding an ‘a’ to the growing column of letters. “Anat?”
“I?” the girl guessed.
Another arm appeared on the purported puppet, and the ‘i’ went into the wrong guesses column.
“Icarus?”
The boy hesitated for a moment and then turned to his classmates for strategic help. “Should I guess another vowel?”
“It’s such a messed-up language,” Monos said. “It’s got different words for everything.”
“There are only four blanks,” Naomi observed. “Lots of short words only have one vowel.”
“What’s another common letter, then?” Icarus asked.
“M? N?” the girl suggested.
“M,” the boy tried.
eBeth drew a leg and added ‘m’ to the side column, but I thought she looked a little nervous, as if she’d had a close escape. “Mary?”
“N.”
The third blank took the ‘n’ so the slate now showed a single blank followed by ‘ent.’
The children huddled together for another strategy meeting, and this time they whispered to each other, occasionally glancing over their shoulders at the teacher to make sure she wasn’t listening in. I was able to eavesdrop with my superior hearing, and I was surprised by the sophistication of their discussion, which led to delegating Monos as a spokesman for their concerns.
“How many more turns do we get?” he asked when the huddle broke up.
“One,” eBeth told them. “As soon as I draw the other leg, you lose.”
“How about eyes?” Monos demanded. “All puppets have eyes.”
“He’s right. Even my sister’s chicken puppet has eyes,” another boy chimed in. “And a mouth.”
I thought they had valid points and I wondered how much flexibility eBeth would demonstrate. Truth be told, I suspected she would have made a good dictator, but I admit that my current assessment of the girl’s personality had been influenced by her recent jewelry shopping advice.
“Alright, but eyes count for a single turn, and no more additions,” she counter-offered.
“Deal,” Monos replied immediately, tipping his hand that she’d given them more than they’d expected to get.
“Philo?” eBeth said, pointing at another boy.
“B,” he guessed.
eBeth drew the last leg and put a ‘b’ in the misses column. “Leah?”
“D?”
Two dots appeared for eyes and the ‘d’ was listed to the side. The children went back into their huddle and began quietly singing their way through the alphabet.”
“Is ‘lent’ a word?” a girl asked. “It sounds like one.”
“I don’t think we’ve had it yet,” Naomi said. “Teacher wouldn’t choose a word we didn’t know.”
“Would too,” Monos argued, and I had to agree with him.
“Is ‘pent’ a word?” asked the same girl in a show of linguistic intuition.
“Maybe, but ‘p’ was used already,” Naomi said. “There’s still ‘rent’, ‘sent’, ‘tent’, ‘vent’, and ‘went’, and we only have one more guess.”
“Isn’t ‘went’ one of those strange verbs that teacher likes so much?” Delphi asked.
“You’re right,” Monos agreed. “How do you get from ‘go’ to ‘went’ anyway? They don’t share a single root letter!”
Again I found myself impressed by eBeth’s young students. While irregular conjugations were no challenge for an artificial intelligence such as myself, I imagined that the alien tourists who were certainly visiting Earth through the new portal connections must be tearing up their phrase books in exasperation and renting translation devices. The huddle broke up again.
“Naomi?” eBeth chose.
“Went,” the girl said.
eBeth hesitated for a moment before putting a ‘w’ in the first blank, causing the children to break out in another noisy celebration. She threw me a mysterious smile, and I realized that I’d never know whether she had cheated at her own game to let the children win. It seemed like the sort of thing Sue would do, and I was coming to realize that my supposed wife and daughter had more in common with each other than I would have expected.
“Does anybody want to lick the mixing spoon?” Sue called from the door to the kitchen.
I thought that there was going to be a stampede by the way the children all started to their feet, but Spot was faster, flying in from an oblique angle and snatching the entire wooden spoon from Sue’s hand on his way to the exit. The riot was over before it had even begun.
“Mark, help me bring out the sandwiches, and the cookies will be cool by the time the children finish lunch.”
As I headed for the kitchen, I heard Monos asking eBeth, “What’s a sandwich?”
“Like a gyro, only flatter,” she told him. “You’ll like it. You like everything.”
Sue had outdone herself, making enough sandwiches for a small army using thin slices of home-baked bread and what looked like all of the lettuce and tomato from her garden. Throwing a white dishtowel over my arm for effect, I entered into my role as waiter for the group of young sophisticates.
eBeth had directed the children into joining a few of the smaller tables together and surrounding them with chairs so that everybody could sit together. I noticed that the students seemed to arrange themselves according to some predetermined order, and after they each took a half a sandwich and held it uneaten as if waiting for something, the reason became clear.
“Uncle John is coming to dinner,” Monos announced, and all of the children passed their sandwich to the neighbor on their left. Even more surprisingly, they all seemed happy with what they got because they began munching away. eBeth took a bite from the tomato-and-mutton sandwich she’d ended up with, and her lack of reaction told me that it wasn’t the first time she’d played this particular table game.
“Wasn’t that a Rynxian banquet ritual?” Sue whispered in my ear.
“I don’t see how,” I murmured back, though I have to admit that the same thought had crossed my mind. We both watched for what would happen next.
When the slowest eater finished her cheese sandwich, Naomi passed around the bowl of small spring potatoes and each child on her side of the table took exactly one. Then she declared, “My Aunt Rachel is visiting,” and the students across from them opened their mouths wide. The air was momentarily filled with potatoes describing a short arc across space, and not a single child missed the mark. Again, eBeth seemed entirely at home with the proceedings.
“That was definitely a Hanker party game,” Sue whispered. “Pffift couldn’t have done it better.”
“And he would have known if any of his people had ever visited this world,” I said. “That must mean—”
“Do you have any serving sticks?” Icarus asked his teacher. “I want to eat the way my mom taught us.”
“I thought two specials a meal was the limit,” eBeth replied, putting air quotes around ‘specials.’
“We do three on holidays.”
“I don’t think we have any,” eBeth said. “Mark? Do we have any chopsticks?”
“I’m afraid not,” I replied, and addressed the boy. “Do you know where your mother learned how to eat that way?”
“Traveling for work,” he replied, and then the conversation was taken over by an argument between Monos and Naomi about the difference between the perfect tense in their own language and the past tense that eBeth was teaching them. Somehow the pile of sandwiches steadily disappeared despite the fact that all of the children seemed to be continuously talking.
“Cookies are ready,” Sue announced, and passed me a large tray on which the dessert was still cooling. Spot chose this moment to reappear and drop a badly chewed stirring spoon at her feet. She picked it up, and for a moment I thought she was going to rap him on the snout with it, but one look at those soulful eyes and she relented, setting the mixing bowl on the floor for him to lick clean.
“So who can tell me what they want to do when they grow up?” eBeth challenged her students as they dug into the warm cookies.
“You mean after we apprentice or go to the academy?” Naomi asked.