Side Trip

by Renee Duke

  The Ralgonian seemed to sense our interest in him. Turning around, he glanced in our direction and went on his way.

  “There are no tourist attractions around here,” Jip pointed out as he disappeared around a corner.

  “Well, perhaps he’s as skint as we are and looking to pawn some of his stuff. There are several pawnshops on this street.”

  There were pawnshops all over the planet. Sustra abounded in them. We disposed of surplus gear everywhere we went until, at last, our only excess items were our Bridge of Jewels miniatures, two carved plates Jip had bought on Gethev, and other assorted souvenirs. With a few pangs of regret, we hocked them too, and headed for the last city on our places-to-go-on-Sustra list.

  The souvenirs did not fetch as much as some of the other things we had pawned and we had to sign on at a work centre almost right away. This time, however, we drew well- paying jobs in a childcare facility called Teeny Weeny House. The demand for child attendants was so high its operators were attempting to attract new employees by offering them a paid day off for every two days of work. This type of schedule seemed so ideally suited to working tourists like ourselves, we accepted the positions at once.

  Teeny Weeny House was a large, colourful building in spacious grounds enclosed by a high wall. We heard the children long before we got to the front door, but no one heard us when we pressed the buzzer. After the automatic door scanned our security cards from the work centre, it slid open to allow us access to a narrow entrance passage. Inside the passage, small outdoor garments were piled in a heap and footwear scattered hither and yon. We could see coat hooks and shelves at the far end, but these were obviously only decorative.

  A flustered-looking woman came forward to greet us, gripping a wailing preschooler in each hand. “You must be from the work centre,” she said, beaming. “Come in. The children are all in the big playroom at the moment.”

  She led us into a large room. Its only furnishings were an overturned bench and a low brown and white table strewn with puzzle pieces. Bright, child-oriented pictures covered the walls and toys covered most of the floor. Forgetting their recent grievance, the two children the woman had been holding ran to join some kids who were jumping off the top of an indoor climbing apparatus. They didn’t stay with this activity, though. In less than a minute, they went scuttling off to do something else.

  In other sections of the room, children were quarrelling over who had had what toy first, or doing their best to break any that were in their possession. Others simply ran around shrieking. There looked to be at least a hundred of them, but the attendant assured us there were only thirty. The chaotic scene bore little resemblance to any of the day care centres Kirsty and I had been in during our formative years.

  “Do you not have rules against running indoors?” Kirsty inquired.

  “Or shouting, and throwing things around?” I added, as a child hurled a puzzle that had been frustrating him into a corner.

  The attendant laughed. “Of course not. Children have to run off energy.”

  That they certainly seemed bent on doing. They were literally never still. Considering the rate at which we’d seen adult Sustrans move, I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised us.

  “Do you have any rules at all?” asked Kirsty, seeing a small boy pick up a toy air bus and whack a small girl across the arm with it. “Basic safety ones, perhaps? Like no hitting with hard objects?”

  Sighing, the attendant took the offending toy away from the one child and murmured words of comfort to the other. “We do try to discourage acts of aggression and keep the children from engaging in anything that could lead to injury. Beyond that, it’s up to you. The children are very adaptable. Despite our high staff turnover, they usually manage to accommodate most people’s standards of behaviour.”

  They never managed to accommodate ours. As the oldest of three, I considered myself an expert on childcare, but I’d never, ever, had to deal with kids like these. When my siblings were little, Arlyne had been sweetness and co-operation personified, and Simon, well, even on his worst day, he’d never been that bad. If determined to get his own way, my brother favoured covert operations over throwing tantrums or hitting people. He could also sit still for more than half a minute, something these kids were completely incapable of.

  We put in a perfectly horrible day. Playtime was followed by painting time, in which more paint wound up on the children and the protective floor covering than on the sheets of paper provided. And when Kirsty and I herded some of the little monsters into the bathroom to wash the paint off, one boy placed his multi-coloured palm directly up under a faucet, spraying water everywhere. Delighted with the result, the others copied him. Before long, there was water all over the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling. The children slid about, splashing in puddles and squealing with glee.

  Kirsty took exception to their antics in much the same manner as she had the snurboks’. Unlike the snurboks, the children paid no attention to her.

  Eventually, their hilarity subsided of its own accord. We cleaned up the bathroom and took them into the dining room for lunch. This was a ghastly experience all by itself. We each had to preside over a table of five children who spent the entire meal playing with their food, climbing on and off their chairs, crawling under the table, pushing and joggling each other, and knocking things over with monotonous regularity.

  “No wonder there’s a high turnover in this job,” I said, leaning forward to mop up a spilled protein drink and smack the fingers of the child who was patting his hand in it. “Sustran children are savages.”

  After lunch, the children had what the supervisor erroneously called Quiet Time, during which they lay on little cots squirming, giggling, and kicking, or poking each other. While they were thus engaged, the supervisor and attendants gulped down restorative mugs of a hot beverage called squaffa. The supervisor then got her charges up and read them a story, though how she imagined they could take it in when they were all talking and tussling about was beyond me. When she had finished, she turned off the viewer the children had supposedly been watching the story’s animated illustrations on, and told us we could take them out to play. This resulted in a stampede into the entrance passage and numerous wails from children unable to find their coats and shoes.

  The clamour of little voices was only slightly less noticeable outside than in. We spent most of our time snatching children out of the paths of swings and riding toys, and settling disputes as to whose turn it was to be on what. We also had to retrieve from beyond the gates those mechanically minded little dears who could undo the childproof fastener. Which was almost all of them.

  Later on, the children were brought indoors for a supervised group activity designed to enhance their awareness and appreciation of music. This basically amounted to sitting them down with some instruments and encouraging them to make a horrible din. After that, they did crafts, which was a repeat of painting time except that, this time, they got paste and craft materials everywhere instead of paint. Once their projects were complete, we were told to turn them loose in the big playroom until their parents came to claim them. As full of energy late in the afternoon as they had been in the morning, the children kept us fully occupied until the last little troll had been picked up and the centre put back in some semblance of order.

  The next day was, if possible, even worse. Only the thought of our paid day off helped us to endure it. We came out of Teeny Weeny House aching in every muscle and were not at all eager to follow our upcoming day of leisure with another two days of work, high pay or no high pay. But the sight of a sombrely clad man hurrying away from the gates made us forget our fatigue. It was the Ralgonian. This time, even Kirsty thought his appearances were becoming too frequent to be purely coincidental. He had to be following us. But why?

  “Do you think he could be a seeker of runaways?” Jip asked us. “You said your guardians might hire one.”

  I shook my head. “Someone like that would have pounced on us by
now. Besides, our trail was too well covered. There has to be some other reason for him to be showing such an interest in us.”

  “It’s an interest I’m beginning not to care for,” said Kirsty. “We’d best pass up having supper and get back to oor hotel while it’s still light oot.”

  Our hotel room had two single beds in the middle and another to the side. That night we pushed them closer to each other and locked the door of the adjoining kitchenette.

  A second strenuous day of chasing after tiny Sustrans should have helped us sleep soundly despite our uneasiness, but about an hour after we went to bed, I woke up with the distinct feeling something was wrong.

  I looked across at Jip. She was also awake.

  “Did you hear something?” I whispered.

  She nodded.

  Kirsty woke up too, and the three of us sat up in bed to listen to the sounds that had disturbed us. Scraping and bumping sounds. The sounds of someone trying to climb in the window of the kitchenette.

  Chapter Eleven

  A soft thud indicated our visitor had managed to get inside. It was followed by cautious footsteps moving toward the door leading into our room. Then came a series of systematic clicks—clicks indicative of lock deactivation. Though tempted to have hysterics, I realized they would serve no useful purpose, and slid out of bed and looked for something I could use as a weapon.

  There wasn’t much.

  Quietly placing a chair to one side of the door, I motioned for Jip to hand me her travel bag so I could flatten our uninvited guest with it as soon as he came through the door. Following my lead, Kirsty took up a ground position with her own bag, and Jip stationed herself by the light control panel on the far side of the room.

  The lock gave a moment later. As the door slid open, Jip jabbed on the lights in an attempt to startle the intruder. But any gasps of surprise going around came from us, for the small person who stood blinking in the sudden bright light was not the mysterious Ralgonian stalker we’d been expecting.

  “Simon,” I squawked. “What are you doing here? Where have you come from?”

  “Gethev,” my brother replied as I cast the travel bag aside and jumped down from the chair. “I followed you there from Heltiga, and from there to here. I’ve been trying to find you for ages.”

  “Why? You told me you didn’t want to travel with us. Your note said you were leaving Heltiga and going to a planet where child welfare workers weren’t quite so dedicated to their jobs.”

  “And I was. At least, I thought I was. But I wrote you that note before Nathan and Leopold found out what I did with the ring.”

  “What ring?”

  “The Ring of Beom. The ring in that parcel I gave you. They want it back.”

  “What would Nathan and Leopold, who are, I presume, those two young ruffians you were keeping company with, want with a replica of the Ring of Beom?”

  “It isn’t a replica. It’s the real one.”

  “The real one? How could it be the real one? The real one was stolen weeks ago.”

  “I know. I was the one who stole it.”

  Jip looked horrified. “Is he joking?” she inquired.

  One look at my brother’s face told me he wasn’t. “Maybe we’d better sit down and have him tell us the whole story.”

  The four of us clambered onto the beds and sat in a row.

  “From the beginning, Simon,” Kirsty said grimly.

  “Well, like I told you, I met Nathan and Leopold in a freight yard in Heltig. I don’t know what they were doing there, but I do know they’d had some brushes with the law back on Earth, and were into a few shady deals on Heltiga too.”

  “And everywhere else they’ve ever been, I’ll bet,” I interjected. “I knew they were thugs as soon as I saw them. That’s why I didn’t want you travelling with them.”

  “I haven’t been. I never intended to. I just told you that so you’d think I’d be with some older guys and not worry about me.”

  “How considerate of you.”

  He grimaced, and went on. “Their dad was in charge of security at the Cholarian exhibit. AUP security, anyway. I only met him once or twice. I didn’t like him much. He was always bragging about what a good job his people were doing, and how good his system was. But it wasn’t a good system at all. Nathan said anyone could get past it.”

  “Which made you decide to give it a try, I suppose.”

  “No. Well, yes, in a way. But it was Nathan and Leopold’s idea. They said they wanted security beefed up before something bad happened and their father got blamed for it. They said, maybe, if a kid broke into the Imperial Exhibition Hall and stole something, he’d know his security measures weren’t as good as he thought they were.”

  “How did you get in?” I inquired. “Breaking into our room was one thing; it wasn’t near anything important. Security in the rest of the museum must have been way tighter.”

  Simon shook his head. “Most of the scanners were designed for grown-ups. I didn’t even register on some of them. And it really didn’t take me long to disable the ones that could have picked me up. The alarm system on the ring’s display case gave me a bit of trouble, but I found a way around it. Then I opened up the cabinet, exchanged the real Ring of Beom for a replica, and put everything back in place so that nothing looked as though it had been touched.”

  Kirsty frowned. “What aboot the guards? They couldn’t have been idle throughout all this. Did they not come round at regular intervals?”

  “Nathan gave me a patrol schedule to study so I could get into the museum without running into any of them. Once I was inside, the only guys I had to watch out for were those Hereditary Treasure Keepers from Cholar. Two of them were always on duty outside the central display rooms.”

  “How did you get past them?” I asked.

  “The Keepers were used to seeing Nathan and Leopold around the place. Leopold kept them talking long enough for me to exchange the rings. Nathan was waiting outside. I gave him the ring I’d taken, and when Leopold came out, we all went back to our hotel. They took the ring with them when they went to talk to their father the next morning. As soon as they came back, Nathan tossed me what he said was the replica. He told me I could keep it as a reward for helping them expose the weaknesses in the exhibit’s security system.” He hesitated a moment. “I did sort of wonder why no one was attempting to do anything about those weaknesses, but Leopold said their old man was just making the changes quietly because he was kind of embarrassed by our little trick.”

  “And you believed that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? Officials do hush up embarrassing incidents, you know.”

  “They’d never have got away with hushing up something as important as that. You should have known those boys were lying. I thought you were supposed to be clever.”

  Simon bit his lip and looked away.

  Kirsty put her hand on my arm. “Och, dinna take on so, Meda. He’s only a bairn. He thought it was all for fun. And things probably weren’t as obvious to him then as they are now he’s telling us aboot them. Look at us on the Derridus. We didn’t exactly pick up on the fact we weren’t legitimate passengers.”

  “No, I suppose we didn’t,” I conceded. “But what made you follow us to Gethev, Simon? There was no record of our departure for there. We stowed away on the Derridus.”

  “I know. Leopold saw you go off with two of its crewman. I’d already told him you’d tried to put the child welfare people onto me. He thought I’d be pleased to hear my interfering sister and her friends were leaving the planet. Of course, he didn’t know that I’d written to you, or that I gave you the ring. He and Nathan were awfully mad when they found out about that—but I would never have told them if I’d known it was the real ring, honestly I wouldn’t. They really want it back, and they’ll go to any lengths to get it.”

  He turned to me, his eyes brimming with tears, just like when he was little, and I was the biggest person around to offer him comfort. I put my arm around him
and hugged him to me. “It’s all right,” I said. “I know you didn’t mean to involve us.”

  “I canna understand why they gave you the ring in the first place,” said Kirsty. “If they were wanting to return it for a big reward or something, why did they not just keep it themselves?”

  Simon brushed away a tear. “They were working for other people. People they were afraid of. Maybe they thought it would be safer for them if someone else held onto the ring until word of the theft got out.”

  “Why did that take so long? I asked. “You must have exchanged the rings before we left Heltiga. We’d almost got to Gethev before Taz heard about it.”

  “I know. I exchanged them the same night I met you, but no one caught onto it because there weren’t too many people on Heltiga who could recognize the real Ring of Beom. The High Prince and his chief advisors were all off doing public relations stuff, and the Hereditary Keeper of the Sacred Ring had got some kind of food poisoning and was off sick.”

  “Do you think someone slipped him something?”

  Simon thought it likely. “He was still out of commission when the ring was transferred up to the Derridus for the trip back to Cholar. He had to stay behind, and the Keeper who took his place aboard ship didn’t think to check the ring’s authenticity. Then, a couple of days later, Mr. XanChiv got an anonymous message claiming the famous ring that people would soon be swearing Oaths of Loyalty on was nothing but a fake. He contacted the Derridus and, well, you know the rest.

  “By then Nathan and Leopold knew you had the real ring. They booked passage to Gethev and set out to find you. But it looks like, so far, you’re okay. They haven’t caught up with you.”

  “Someone else has, though,” said Jip quietly.

  I explained about the Ralgonian.

  Simon’s eyes went wide. “He must be working for the same bunch as Nathan and Leopold.”