“I’m not letting you off the hook, Dolph,” Irene said without looking at him. “But it’s kinda different for Mike, you know? He has responsibilities.”
“And I don’t,” Dolph said, sounding pissed off, but he was getting the wrong end of the stick. Irene meant Lucy.
“So come to this thing tomorrow, Mike. Just try and be a normal father and don’t shoot anyone. Especially not Mia’s teacher,” she added, to take the sting out of her lecture. “That sanctimonious cow is mine.”
We all laughed, but Irene’s words struck home. I prided myself on being a good father. I had told Sophia that Lucy was my everything. The least I could do was go to this damn event. Being off-world so much of the time, I missed too many of Lucy’s events, and seldom made the parent-teacher conferences. I didn’t even know what they were teaching her at that place.
“OK, I’ll go,” I said. “What time we gotta wake up?”
26
I dreamed about Sophia. It was one of those dreams. I hadn’t had one in a while. This one was a doozy, as if my subconscious was punishing me for having tried to move on. It built off our encounter in the Mujin Inc office, and ended up with me ravishing her over a desk, while she told me how much she hated me.
Pretty horrible. But I was not in control. I woke up shuddering, with a wet spot on my shorts.
It was still early. I crept into the bathroom, showered, and washed my shorts myself in the sink—stupidly, I didn’t want to leave them in the laundry basket for Nanny B to find, not that her programming allowed her to understand about wet dreams.
It would probably help if I got laid. Yeah. But the chances of that seemed about as remote as Parsec deciding to forgive and forget what happened yesterday.
While I drank coffee and ate cereal at the kitchen table, I checked my phone for updates on the Silverback situation. It only took me thirty seconds to uncover a death threat against me, posted by Canuck.
“Lulu,” I yelled, pouring a glass of klimfruit juice and getting another cereal bowl down from the cabinet. “Wake up! We’re going to the zoo.”
We collected Irene, Mia, and Kit, and rode uptown in my truck. The zoo was uptown of uptown, in the hills, a mini terrestrial ecosystem defended against the aggressive PdL wildlife by force fields and ditches salted with weedkiller.
I wished Rex was there, as I turned out to be one of the lone fathers in a sea of mothers. But it was just as well I had come, because every child was supposed to have a parent or guardian present to participate in their discernment.
Yeah. That’s what they called it.
On San Damiano, discernment means considering a religious vocation. Choosing an animal form is just something that happens naturally.
While I felt crusty about the bureaucratization of something that should be natural, I tried to recognize that it was great the school was doing this at all. They weren’t trying to pretend that their Shifter pupils were normies. They had formulated this program especially to help them optimize their genetic abilities.
Just like the army formulated the 15th Reconnaissance Brigade, a cynical voice whispered in my mind.
I put a lid on the past and listened to what the student life coordinator was telling us as we stood just inside the entrance to the zoo, a chaotic mob of parents and kids in yellow school hats.
“First,” she yelled, “we will visit all the exhibits marked on the handout. Then we’ll have lunch, then free play.” She went on about hats, sunscreen, mosquito repellent, and thermoses. She was easy to listen to, despite the banality of what she was saying. She had a pale oval face, shiny waves of cinnamon-colored hair, and great legs. She gestured expansively as she spoke in an effort to keep the children’s attention. “Starting at two o’clock, we’ll do individual discernments in the rest area right here. Please, please, moms and dads, make sure your child is not late for their slot!”
I checked the handout on my phone. There were forty kids in the combined second and third grades, and Lucy’s slot was dead last. Great. This was going to burn the entire day.
At least I would not have to worry about Canuck jumping me at the zoo. I had brought my new Machina .22, just in case, in a paddle holster. Sweat glued the holster to my back as the sun rose higher in the brassy blue sky.
Ponce de Leon was chosen for colonization first out of all the planets in the Cluster because its day is almost the same length as Earth’s: 24 hours and 11 minutes. Those 11 minutes get tacked on after midnight. People call it the witching hour, and on holidays, they set off special witching hour fireworks on the strip.
To some extent, day length and other planetary features serve as natural sorting mechanisms to prevent species from coming into conflict. No human would want to live on a planet with a 50-hour day, let alone a day as long as its year. The Eks would. They don’t give a crap about hours of daylight. There is much that they don’t give a crap about. The stargends, meanwhile, prefer tidally locked worlds where it’s always day. The aiora like snowy worlds that are too cold for anyone else, the huspathids prefer water worlds, and so on. Other species, lacking political power, don’t have the luxury of choice.
But planetary incompatibility doesn’t stop life from going on, and it does not stop all the species in the Cluster from flocking to Ponce de Leon as tourists. The zoo was especially popular with aliens, as they got to gape at terrestrial animals they had never conceived of.
Nor, it appeared, had some of Lucy’s classmates.
It just about broke my heart to see the children staring dropjawed at the lions in their arboreal enclosure, and asking the teachers, “Are they real?”
On the other side of the glass, a male lion sprawled on a rock, looking hilariously like Rex after a few beers—as Mia pointed out, loudly.
But it was clear that most of the kids had never seen a lion before, be it a Shifter or a real one. Their parents did not take them to the zoo, either because they didn’t think it was important or they didn’t care—and our school was at the good end of Shiftertown. The children were familiar only with the animals in their immediate families. There are a lot of marine Shifters on the PdL; when we got to the seals and sea lions, whoops of recognition went up. Wolves, yay! Bears, not so much. The big cats got a few flickers of interest. But for the most part, the children simply stared at the animals without engaging, as if they were watching holos. Even our girls adopted the same air of uneasy tedium, not wanting to stand out from their classmates.
The exception—an unfortunate one—was Kit. Irene had brought him along to give Rex a break. At nearly every single enclosure, he lunged forward, intent on climbing in or breaking through the glass, shouting the name of the animal within. It took me and Irene together to restrain him.
At lunchtime, the frustration got to be too much for him and he threw a tantrum, while Lucy and his long-suffering sister quietly ate their sandwiches and pretended they didn’t know him. I ended up taking him into the reptile house so that Irene could grab some lunch.
“Hey, Kit,” I said.
“That’s an anaconda,” he said, sitting on the floor in front of its enclosure, rocking back and forth. “It’s the second-longest snake. It constricts its prey, and mostly likes to be awake at night.”
Yes, Kit was five years old, but he knew his stuff. He could have taught a natural history class to his elders.
“Do you like anacondas?” I said.
He gave me an uncomprehending stare. “They’re very good at swimming.”
I led him to a bench. We watched the anaconda doing nothing. It was dim in the reptile house, with that unique funky smell. Aliens swayed, stalked, and perambulated past. Kit stopped rocking, which was a good sign.
“Do you have a favorite animal?” I asked him.
“I like all of them,” he said. “I’m especially a huge fan of the canidae, the mustelidae, the hyaenidae, and the eupleridae.”
The long-forgotten Latin names plucked unwanted chords of memory. Once, I too had had them all off by heart.
>
I hesitated. Then said, “When I was a kid, I was like you.”
“I have Chimera Syndrome,” Kit said.
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” I said.
“Let’s go look at the cobra,” Kit said, getting up. “Did you know that they have hollow fangs? They can’t hold their fangs down to bite their prey, so they inject venom into them.”
“Yes, Kit,” I said sadly. “I know that.”
What had I been thinking? There was no point in sharing my big secret with a troubled preschooler. He knew that he had Chimera Syndrome, but he didn’t understand what it meant. Hell, not even I understood it properly, and I’d lived with it for forty-four years.
So we went and watched the cobra, until Kit said, “I’m hungry.”
“What would you like?”
“A mouse,” he said, and smiled. “But I don’t mind having a hamburger.”
I took him back to the open-air food court, and by the time everyone was lunched and toileted I had missed my chance to talk to the student life coordinator about Pippa.
After lunch, we all separated, parents with their own children, to look at the animals again.
A certain tension had developed during the morning, and it became almost unbearable, for me anyway, as Lucy hesitated at a fork in the path. One way led back to the big cats, the other led to the marine animals. I concentrated on keeping my mouth shut. I couldn’t say anything that would unduly influence her choices.
Lucy turned around and started back the way we had come. I tried to remember what was this way. The wolves, jackals, and hyenas. Also the kangaroos. And the rhinos. Surely not.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Daddy?” she said again, her glance roving over a cage containing birds of some kind (Accipiter, said my mind) which we were not interested in. Lucy was swinging her hat by its strap, despite having been told repeatedly to wear it. Her cheeks were pink with heat. Sweaty commas of hair stuck to her temples. “Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetie, what is it?”
“What if I don’t get an animal form?”
I parsed this instantly. “Of course you will.”
“But what if I don’t?”
I hadn’t told her anything about Sophia, not even her name. But I had told her that Sophia wasn’t a Shifter.
I opened my mouth to deflect her question with vague reassurances, and then changed my mind. I was going to have to start explaining things to her sometime.
“Honey, Shifting is inherited. That means if your mom and dad are Shifters, you’re a Shifter, too. But—but—the genes for Shifting are dominant. That means you’re a Shifter even if only one of your parents is. So don’t worry. You will get an animal form.”
“But what if I don’t want to be a Shifter?”
I tensed in surprise. “Well, you are,” I said. It had never occurred to me that she might feel ambivalent about her heritage.
“Good,” she said, to my relief. “Why are you a Shifter?”
“Because my mom and dad are.”
“Why are they?”
“Because … well, OK. Long, long ago humans set out from Earth to colonize other planets. At first it went pretty slow. Their ships weren’t as good as the ones we have now. So when they left a bunch of people on a planet, those people might be all on their own for hundreds of years.” Lucy nodded. “One of those planets was San Damiano, where Granny and Granddad live. And the people who colonized it … well, at that time, people were thinking about all kinds of ways to modify our bodies. And those people decided it would be good if they could Shift, so that we would never forget where we come from.” I was leaving out a lot here. The mindset that led to the Big Shift had been absolutely screwy from our modern point of view. They had believed humanity’s destiny was to be the apex predator throughout the galaxy. There had also been food shortages on San Damiano in the early days, which had made Shifting look like a good survival solution. As an animal, you don’t have to wait for crops to grow. You just go hunting.
One of the under-appreciated benefits of Shifting is that we’re more omnivorous than mainstream humans, thanks to our souped-up digestive enzymes. But I didn’t need to get into all that with Lucy. “So to this day, we Shift into animals to remember the planet where humanity came from.” I waited a beat. “And also so that we can get into stupid fights.”
“Daddy. You do not get into stupid fights.”
“You’re right, my darling,” I said with an inner wince. “We don’t Shift to get into stupid fights. We Shift because it’s fun.”
Lucy grinned. “I think being a rhino would be fun.” We were passing the rhino enclosure. The two African black rhinos disinterestedly chewed leaves, unaware that they, too, were thousands of light years from their planet of origin.
“Sure,” I said. “Spend all day chomping leaves, and occasionally get into stupid fights. Sounds like fun to me.”
She giggled. “Are rhinos predators?”
“Nope.”
“Do I have to pick a predator?”
“Sweetie,” I said, “you don’t have to pick anything yet. You’re only eight. It’s preposterous to make you think about it at this age. I don’t know what’s going through their minds. So let’s just enjoy the zoo. And put your hat on!”
We wandered from the giraffes to the elephants and back to the marine animals, and we had an ice cream, and at last it was time for Lucy’s discernment.
We found the student life coordinator in the rest area near the gate. All the other kids ran around playing. Instead of joining in the fun, Lucy had to sit down with me and the coordinator at a picnic table.
“Hi, Lucy,” the coordinator said. She had a holobook in front of her. She looked wiped out, but her voice kept a determinedly perky ring. She shook my hand across the table. “Mr. Starrunner? I’m Christy Day.”
“I know,” I said. That didn’t come out right. “I mean, I’ve seen your name on the school feed.”
“Right. I coordinate the extra-curricular activities and liaise with parents, so I’m glad to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise,” I said. I was having trouble keeping my eyes where they belonged. Her oversized Shoreside Elementary t-shirt and cargo shorts hit on the high points of her figure, challenging me to guess what lay underneath. I sternly pushed those thoughts out of my mind. “It’s great to meet you.”
She nodded and tapped on her holobook, presumably bringing up Lucy’s file, though it was blank from our side of the table. “So, Lucy, have you had fun today?”
Lucy nodded.
“Have you been to the zoo before?”
Nod.
“I bring her at least once every couple of months,” I said, establishing my credentials as a good parent.
“That’s great. So do you have a favorite animal, Lucy?”
Lucy was wriggling on the bench and swinging her legs, kicking the underside of the table. I reached over and pushed down on her knees to stop her. “I want to be the same as my daddy,” she said.
“Ah, a jaguar?” Christy said.
At the exact same time, Lucy said, “A tiger.”
I winced. Back when Lucy first started school I had given my animal form as jaguar, because that’s what I was mostly using back then. But I had burned the jaguar during a previous run-in with Buzz Parsec. I didn’t want anyone finding out about it now. “That’s a mistake,” I started to say.
“Your dad has two forms?” Christy said to Lucy.
“He has lots of forms,” Lucy said.
I pushed down on her knees harder, cursing her childish honesty. She was exaggerating, anyway. She’d only ever seen three of my forms: the tiger, the wolf, and a zorilla, which is actually a species of polecat, genus Mustelidae. I only did that one once, to amuse her when she had flu.
“What, Daddy?” Lucy said, wriggling away from me.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Why don’t you tell Ms. Day what you liked best today?”
“The ice-
cream,” she said promptly.
Christy and I shared a smile—ha, ha, kids! She had a beautiful smile, as bright as sunshine on a hungover morning. We chatted a bit about the animals. If Christy could make any predictions about Lucy’s future choice of animal based on her random observations, she was smarter than I was. After ten minutes we stood up.
Outside the zoo gates, the class teachers were herding the car-less kids and parents back onto the bus. Irene, Mia, and Kit stood beside my truck on the far side of the parking lot. They were more than ready to get going, based on the sharp sound of Irene telling Kit off.
I said, “Ms. Day, I actually wanted to talk to you—”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m here to help with anything at all.”
“It’s not about Lucy.”
She turned pink. The color spread from her hairline to the crew neck of her t-shirt, faint but unmistakable. It was bewitching.
I swallowed, realizing she had misunderstood me. “What I mean is, I was hoping to tap your expertise regarding, um, a different matter …”
You can’t just come out and say, I was hoping you could help me bust a terminally ill child out of detention.
Especially when what you really want to say, is, Are you free tonight?
She broke into my fumbling. “I’d be glad to help,” she said. “But if it’s a sensitive issue, you’d better not call me at the school.” Without meeting my eyes, she opened her holobook and stabbed at it. My phone beeped in my pocket, registering an incoming message. Of course, she had my number in Lucy’s file. “Feel free to call me anytime,” she said.
She made eye contact for a split second before walking away. Her gaze was not coy or flirty. It held a sort of scared pugnaciousness that nailed my feet to the ground.
Lucy dragged on my hand. We trailed over to my truck.
“Did you talk to her?” Irene said.
“She gave me her number,” I said.
“OK,” Irene said, not thinking anything of it. She was tired, and Kit was snuffling away the aftermath of another meltdown on her lap. “Call her. I’m sure she can help. She’s nice, unlike that ignorant sow who teaches Mia’s class.”
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