Travails with Momma
(2006)*
Jim Baen's Universe, June, Aug, Oct 2006
John Ringo

Contents

	Chapter 1		Paradise Sucks
	Chapter 2		Durance Vile
	Chapter 3		When In Rome
	Chapter 4		Ignorance Really Is Bliss
	Chapter 5		Take the Last Mango
	Chapter 6		It's All In the Translation
	Chapter 7		Remember, One Seventh of Your Life is Mondays
	Chapter 8		Love, Or At Least Chelo, Conquers All
	Chapter 9		Of Tooleck And Men
	Chapter 10		Never Wrestle A Trekkie
	Chapter 11		Of Thoramite and Cruisers
	Chapter 12		If You're Not Going to Like the Answer ...

Chapter One
Paradise Sucks

	"JOSH!"

	Josh Parker ignored his mother, leaving his eyes closed as he kept reading.

	The book was pretty good, a collection of short biographies of the space aces of the Second Orion War. It was split between the Ortulian front and the Joostan so there was a lot of variety. But the basic theme, Terran superiority in space combat, was what Josh liked. That's what he wanted to be, a fighter pilot.

	He brought up a toolie and began blasting the wicked Ortulians that had started the war by the sneak attack on Diamond Haven. Ortulian fighters fell around his invincible Devilspray space fighter as he flew among the stars ... but he had to rescue the beautiful princess ... Cindy Goodhead. Cindy was so cute. She was in his reading class and ...

	"JOSH! COME DOWN HERE THIS INSTANT!"

	The image of his mother's face appeared in the middle of the combat and with a wave of her hand the fighters and stars disappeared, along with the picture of Cindy tied up in the middle of ten bug-eyed, octopoid Ortulians he was just preparing to defeat in bloody hand to hand combat after which, if he was lucky, he might get a peck on the cheek from Cindy and then they'd have about a half a dozen children ...

	"I have to talk to you, Josh. Now."

	"Oh, Mother," he memed. "Can't you talk to me here?"

	"Now, Josh. Downstairs."

	Josh opened his eyes, wiping the toolie, and shuffled across the room disconsolately. He kicked a datacube out of his way and a blue tunic, making a path through the clutter to the room iris.

	The house was old fashioned and to make his way to the kitchen he had to walk down stairs instead of using a bounce tube. Sure, it was only one floor, but everybody had bounce tubes.

	This was the third house they'd occupied in the Alu Islands. Dad was working on the new Malt Whiskey Corporation theme park outside Greater Papua and after the project got extended by another year, and their lease was up on the house outside Papua, Mom had picked them up and brought them to the Alu. It meant a one hour air-car commute each way for Dad, but Mom was in charge of housing and she could be less than subtle. From her point of view, it was Time To Leave.

	"What do you want, Mother?" Josh said as he entered the kitchen. "Couldn't you just meme me?"

	"Mouths are for talking," his mother said. "Implants are for learning."

	He hated that expression.

	Mom was just pulling a roast out of the fresher and his stomach growled.

	"Can I have a snack?"

	"No," his mother snapped. "You won't have any room for supper."

	"But all I want is a choco-bar," Josh whined.

	"Two or three, more like it," his mother said with her standard sniff. "We're moving back to Bowan."

	"They're finished?" Josh said. "Gosh."

	"With phase three," his mother replied. "So we're going back to the home office."

	"Do we get a house this time?" Josh asked. "I'd really like a house. I want a dog, Mom."

	"No, we'll be in an apartment," his mother replied. "It will be an hour until supper. You need to do something besides read in your room. Outside."

	"Oh, Mom," Josh whined. "It's boring!"

	"It's a nice day out," his mother answered. "Go."

	Josh schlepped out through the back iris and frowned at the view. Waving coconut palms and a pink sand beach surrounded a crystalline cove. The houses around the cove were set back from the beach so that they were barely in view and, except for one or two locals out catching the sun or fishing, the cove was almost deserted. The trade winds blew in a constant stream, lowering the temperature to what most humans considered idyllic.

	Josh went down to the waterside and kicked at the sand. When they'd first come to the Alu Islands, he'd gone swimming nearly every day and turned brown as a nut, his dark brown hair shading to almost white at the tips. It still was bleached and he still had the tan but he'd hardly swam a week at a time anymore. Even swimming in crystalline water could get boring day in and day out. And while Alu was one of prettiest places they'd ever lived, and he'd lived in a bunch of places, there weren't many kids his own age around.

	If they could just settle down for a while. A year here, a year there, by the time the local kids had gotten over beating him up and stealing his lunch money and started to let him steal other kids', it was time to move. They'd lived for two years in Greater Papua, right on a river, and that had been great. Sure, he had to take getting beaten up a time or two not to mention the ritual jokes about having his head collected, but he'd made friends. Had a bunch of kids to play with.

	He wandered along the beach in a deep funk, watching the animals along the waterline. He saw a purple and pink crab in the water and stopped.

	"That's what I want to be," he said. "A superhero! Crab-man!" He held his hands up and made clacking sounds. "Crab-man! With pincers of ... super hero stuff!" Clack, clack. By day, Crab-man was an unassuming fourth grade student. But by night he ... rescued damsels in distress. Especially Cindy Goodhead!

	"Oh, Crab-man, you're my hero," Cindy said, breathlessly.

	"Well, there were only a hundred of them," Crab-man said in a deep voice. He had the arms and legs of a crab but his body was rippling with muscles and he had a really handsome face and black hair and bright green eyes ... "You know, Cindy, by day I'm really ..."

	No, that wouldn't work. Super-heroes never gave away their secret identity. She'd just have to work it out herself and then they'd live in a big house on the top of a mountain and make pancakes while the snow fell and have about ... oh, nineteen kids ...

	Steve Parker sent a command to the airtruck, shutting it down, and dilating the door. He climbed out and stretched his back, wincing. Flying an hour either way to work was ... well, when he'd started it nine months before he'd called it a pain. Now he had an entirely new appreciation for the term.

	But that was about over. For good or ill. Working on the Malt Whiskey project had given him a billing rate that was astronomical. Yara and Barchick had been happy as hell about it. Unfortunately, the number of fifteen billion credit projects to be had on Terra was ... small. The planet had all the infrastructure it could handle and there just wasn't room for the sort of massive projects he specialized in.

	The term he was groping for here was "redundant." As in, "I'm sorry, Mr. Parker, you're simply redundant to our current needs."

	With five kids in college or just starting out in independent life, not to mention a wife and kid at home to support, that was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Which was why he'd pulled every string he had to keep working on Malt Whiskey, long after less competent, and less expensive, engineers could have wrapped it up.

	Before Malt Whiskey he'd spent three solid years doing failure analysis on other planets, especially ones with harsh soil and working conditions. It had been fun, figuring out what other people had screwed up always was, but he'd seen his wife and kids exactly eighty-seven days in those three years. He wasn't looking forward to that, either.

	Something would come up. Something always did.

	"How was your day, dear?" Jala said, ladling spaghetti sauce onto Steve's noodles.

	"Fine," Steve said. "Whiskey Corporate sent another hot-shot out to reinvent the wheel ..."

	Josh tuned out his parent's conversation, twirling the spaghetti. Wrapped in rings of ... really strong stuff, Spaghetti-man ...

	"Do you have another project?" Jala asked, in a tone that bespoke calm disinterest overlaid with worry.

	"No," Steve replied, calmly. "They want me to do ... sales for a while."

	"Oh."

	Josh had learned to not even turn an ear or look up. Grownups would drop the most important information if they were sure you weren't paying attention. And knowing where you were going to live, for a kid, was really important information.

	"So, we'll be at the home office for a while."

	"Do we have an apartment, yet?" Jala asked.

	"No, we'll stay in a hotel while you look for one."

	Josh conjured up his memory of Bowan. Tier upon tier of skyscrapers and megascrapers reaching for the sky. Green? Some of the signs were green, maybe. Water? Sure, it comes out of a tap. Bowan. Well, at least there were kids his age. Approximately nine billion.

	He actually sort of liked Bowan, what he remembered of it. Mostly an apartment and the airbus to school. He'd only been in kindergarten and first grade in Bowan, though. He couldn't remember much. The megascraper had a pool, several actually, but one he could go to. Not by himself, of course, but maybe he'd be old enough, now. And the subcomplex they lived in had board tracks. He wanted to ask if they were going back to the same complex but then they'd know he'd been listening.

	Worst of all, though, he knew the tone. This was a temp. Dad would just be hanging out until they figured out what to do with him next. He might be around for a month but more likely he'd be gone all the time. When they'd lived in Bowan before, there had been brothers and sisters, mostly Anna and Cho. Sure, Cho had been a bastard most of the time, but at least he was somebody to nag. A brother was a brother.

	This time it would just be him and Mom in an apartment.

	They'd kill each other in a week.

	Spaghetti man wraps tendrils of ... really strong stuff around his mother's neck.

	Bad.

	He'd learned the hard way. The bungalow was rented so this time they didn't even have to wait for movers. The next day the back of the aircar was packed with stuff, so was the trunk and most of the backseat; Dad had already sent the company's airtruck back to the site on remote. Josh had packed his stuff the night before; his clothes, some data cubes and his real, honest-to-gosh, bound, paper, copy of Tarzan Lord of the Jungle. The family had furniture and other stuff, but the company had that stored for them. Maybe they'd get some of it out for the apartment. Maybe not. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

	It was going to be a long flight to Bowan. It was a sub-orbital hop but once you've seen one you've seen 'em all. So Josh lay in the back seat, his foot propped up on a bag of clothes, his head on a pillow, closed his eyes and started reading.

	They left early, stopping for breakfast at a greasy spoon in Samoa and lunch on the outskirts of Bowan. It was a McFries outlet on the forty-seventh floor of one of the outer megascrapers. From the window, Josh could see way off in the distance some hills. They were green. He took one more look at them and bit into his McWhopper.

	The earliest memory he had of his dad was him bringing home McWhoppers. It was a big deal, then. He didn't know why; they ate them all the time these days. That had been in Durban. Durban had been pretty cool, from what he could remember of it. The house had been small and old but it was surrounded by trees and he could still hear the screams of the monkeys sometimes when he thought hard. And most of his brothers and sisters were still home so they'd been crowded. But it was in the country and it was near a river. And they had a pool. His earliest conscious memory was of nearly drowning in the pool. Mom and Dad always had a pool, a lake, a river, somewhere to swim. They might move a lot, but they always got to swim.

	There had been a big party when they moved to Bowan; everybody was really happy. He didn't know why, he'd liked Durban. And he'd gotten to like Bowan even if it was different, too. Bowan was cold, most of the time, it seemed to him. And they'd moved into a really small apartment in the megascraper. But the complex had a pool. He'd nearly drowned in that one, too, when Cho had been wrestling with a big null-grav player from school and he'd jumped in to "save" the brother that was ten years older than he was. The next thing Josh could remember was being stuck under the struggling bodies and not being able to get to the surface.

	But this time there wouldn't even be Cho to play with, or at least nag. Cho was married. He lived in Bowan, though, so maybe they'd get together.

	Josh glanced out of his eye as a pretty girl sat down across from them. She was wearing the current fashion which was, as his dad put it one time, "two bangles and a feather." The girl caught him looking and Josh turned away and took another bite out of the burger, blushing.

	He'd never been one of those boys who didn't like girls. He could remember in Durban when he was, maybe, five, getting married to some girl. Just play-acting but they'd been really serious about the vows. A couple of days later she'd wanted a divorce and he'd had to go get the term "annulment" explained to him. He still didn't get it.

	But getting the girl was what it was all about. He knew that from his graphnovs. The good guy got the girl and the bad guy didn't, that's how you could tell the difference. Oh, the bad guy might have some girl hanging around, but he was always after the good guy's girl. Josh wanted to have a girl. One that wore "two bangles and a feather." And he'd save her from evil Jootans by sneaking into their secret base…

	"Time to leave," his dad said.

Chapter Two
Durance Vile

	This was just wrong.

	Josh looked out the plastic-crystal windows and sighed. It was pouring down rain and it looked cold. Not that it would matter because he'd probably never go outside again in his whole life.

	The apartment was fine, but it was small and seemed dark after living for three years in the tropics. And the complex didn't have a pool. Oh, the megascraper had two, but they weren't members of those. So he was left to sit in the apartment all day and read or tool or meme. And with the meme restrictions his parents had put on his plant, he could basically talk to Sati the Clown fans or nothing. And what he considered appropriate for Sati the clown, a Jootan wouldn't do to an Adoo.

	And today was the first day of school. He hated school but "first days," especially when you were already two weeks into the school year and all the kids had broken up into cliques already, were the worst.

	Worse and worse and WORSE Mom was walking him to school.

	"Time to go, Josh," his mom said from the door.

	"I'm sick," Josh said, coughing unconvincingly.

	His mother sighed. "Come on, Josh."

	"Really, really sick," Josh said, slouching towards the door. He coughed again and tried to hack up a gob like Cho could do. No dice.

	They walked down the corridor and to the bounce tube then took a slideway to the November quadrant. As they got closer there were more kids, none of them being led to school by their mom, heading for the big double doors.

	Josh kicked his heels and watched the other kids as his mom checked him in and uploaded his records.

	"Welcome to the Mary Smith Primary School, Josh," the lady behind the counter said.

	"Hi," Josh said after a prod from his mother.

	"He just takes a while to settle in," his mom said.

	"He's certainly been in a lot of schools," the woman replied, frowning at the records. "And there's a six month break ..."

	"I was homeschooling, then," his mom said. "He's met all the standard test requirements," she added, nervously.

	"Yes," the woman said, still frowning. "I hope, though, that he can keep up. We have a very active academic program, one of the highest rated in Bowan. He may have ... problems."

	"He's very bright," his mother said in that hard tone she took when somebody was being unusually stupid. "Just log him in. He'll do fine."

	"Very well," the woman replied, blinking her eyes. "He's in Mrs. Datlow's homeroom. Room 17395."

	Josh closed his eyes for a moment and downloaded a map of the building along with the directions to the class. He was just stepping out to head there when his mother took his hand.

	"Mom," he whined, terrified of the aching embarrassment of having his mother lead him to the class by hand. "I can find it on my own. Look, it's down this corridor, take a left, take the second bounce tube, turn right out of the bounce tube ..."

	"Come on, Josh," his mother said, dragging him along.

	Josh slumped into the hopeless slouch of an Adoo being taken to the Jootan salt mines and followed along.

	It barely took him two classes to find his niche. Complete and total loser.

	"Your assignment for today, class," the teacher said, smiling brilliantly as she passed out pieces of lined plascrip, "is to write a story about what you did on your summer holiday."

	Josh looked at the plascrip in disbelief and then picked up the pencil. He hadn't actually written anything since kindergarten! What was this, the Outer Limits?

	He looked at the teacher and pinged her. When she didn't reply he hesitantly raised his hand.

	"Yes, Josh?" the woman asked, smiling.

	"You want me ... you want me to write?" he asked, holding up the pencil hesitantly.

	"Yes, Josh," the woman replied, still smiling.

	"Bu ... but ..." he looked into the corner of the room and pointed. "There's a printer."

	"I know, Josh," the teacher said, speaking to him as if he were an idiot. "But you have to write it."

	"I can meme it in about ten seconds," Josh said, composing the first sentence and pinging her again.

	"Josh," the woman said, gently but with a tone of anger. "Everyone doesn't have implants. You have to write it."

	"They don't?" he said, horrified. He sent a general ping and the woman shook her head.

	"Josh! Do not broadcast! It's very rude!"

	"But ..."

	"Josh just write the assignment!" the teacher said, angrily.

	Josh bowed his head and picked up the pencil like a dagger, pressing it into the plascrip and trying not to tear it.

	W ... H ... A ... T—

	* * *

	Math wasn't much better.

	"Miss Rodinson?" Josh said, raising his hand after repeated pinging didn't work.

	"Yes, Josh?" the woman said, smiling.

	"That's wrong," Josh said. "It's a nested set. Marsupials are a subset of mammals which are in turn a subset of animals." He got sent a command to the projector and rearranged the teacher's careful work, which she had been laboriously inputting with a keyboard and stylus, showing the nested set. "It's like that. Or in Leet ..."

	"Josh," the woman said, angrily. "Do not rearrange the board. Understand?"

	"Yes, but it's wrong," he insisted. "All marsupials are mammals. All mammals are animals. Ergo supper."

	"Josh, the way that I had it was right," Miss Rodinson said, frantically tapping at the input board. "Drat, I didn't save."

	"It was like this," Josh said, rearranging the projection. "But that's wrong!"

	"It's right, Josh!" the woman argued.

	"No it's not," Josh said, mulishly.

	"Josh, access the answers at the end of the assignment. The even numbered ones have answers. It's in the book."

	Josh accessed the pad in the desk through his plant and then frowned.

	"It's still wrong," he said. "I don't care what the book says ..."

	Then there was lunch.

	"What did you bring me to eat, dweeb?" the bully said, snatching the bag out of Josh's hand. "Think you're smart. What do smart kids eat?"

	"Ham sandwich," Josh sighed. "Apple. Bulb of choco-cola. Frits."

	"Guess I'll be eating well," the kid smirked at him, vanishing into the crowd.

	"Yeah," Josh said, getting in line to buy lunch. He'd learned to keep some money the first few days of school. 'Til kids figured out not to steal his lunches. "And I'll be eating near the teachers. Really near the teachers."

	He was just finishing his jello when he heard the howl at the other end of the cavernous room.

	But, that of course, leads to ... recess.

	"What was in that sandwich?" the kid said, panting as he smacked Josh again.

	"Ow! I dunno! My mother made it!" Fighting wasn't going to do any good. The idiot had shared the sandwich with friends.

	"You're lying!" the kid said, kicking him in the side.

	"Ow!" he said, covering his head with both hands. "Okay, okay! It was habanero sauce ..."

	"Miz Parker ..." the assistant principal said.

	"Mrs.," Josh's mom replied. "Not Miz. Not Miss. Mrs."

	"Mrs. Parker," the woman continued, "we have been getting a number of complaints about Josh. While he is ... quite bright, he has shown some ... antisocial tendencies. Specifically, he has been arguing with teachers ..."

	"Subsets?" Jala said, smiling tightly. "He took that in second grade in Papua. If you have any knowledge of them and access the question and answer you'll find that they are wrong. I've got a PhD in mathematics, I got it when I was sixteen, by the way, Miz Chaberk and I can tell you that in my professional opinion the person who made up your textbook shouldn't be allowed a job as a window washer."

	"Then there is the problem of his lack of basic skills," the woman continued, firmly.

	"Writing?" Jala said, amazed. "You consider writing by hand to be a basic skill? What next? Driving? Long division? Quantum mechanics?"

	"Writing is a basic skill, Mrs. Parker," the woman said, angrily.

	"For whom?" Jala cried. "In every other school district that Josh has attended, meming was considered 'writing,'" she continued, speaking slowly and carefully as if to a complete moron. "You can't get a job in a McWhopper franchise without the ability to at least handle a trace set. There is not a job on Terra that requires the skill of writing. If you give me a pencil and some time I might be able to trace out my name. Can you write?"

	"And he was found defacing the anti-bullying posters," the woman continued, somewhat desperately.

	"Maybe that's because he's come home three days this week with bruises and torn clothes!" Jala snapped.

	"We have a very strict anti-bullying policy ..."

	"MAYBE YOU SHOULD TELL THAT TO YOUR STUDENTS!"

	"Josh," his mom said as he walked in from school. "Sit down."

	"Yes, Mother," Josh said, sighing theatrically. He sat across from her and leaned forward, avoiding the cushion of the float chair and examining his sneakers.

	"I was called to your school today, to talk to your principal," Jala said. "Did you know that?"

	"Yes, Mother," Josh said, apparently fascinated by the sight of his toes.

	"I know it takes a little time to settle in," Jala said, "but you seem to be having more problems here than in Papua."

	"That's because they're stupid!" Josh said. "They're just stupid! All of 'em."

	"They're not stupid, Josh," his mother said. "They're just ... it's a special kind of ... well it's what they call 'parochialism' that you get in major cities. And poor quality education, yes. Things are too large so it's just easier to work for the least common denominator."

	"Okay," Josh said, having no clue what his mother was talking about.

	"I'm ... if we stay here long I'll probably try to get you in a private school," Jala continued.

	"If?" Josh said, picking up on the word that seemed most important in the conversation.

	"Oh, we should be staying here for a while," Jala said, smiling.

	"Here, here?" Josh asked. "In the apartment?"

	"Yes, Josh," Jala replied. "Here, here."

	"Oh."

	Josh was working on swear words. He knew some but he also knew better than to say them to his mother.

	School went on as school always did. The bullies stopped taking his lunches, since they never knew what they were going to be laced with. The transition period was ... tough. He ended up having to both bring a lunch and buy one a couple of times. He had a real aversion to habanero and an even worse aversion to uncooked oyster sauce. He stopped getting beat up so much, but that wasn't the same as making friends. He didn't. Usually he'd find at least one person to hang out with, but not in this school.

	The school was in a state of societal flux; even Josh could tell that. Most of the kids were from the local area and tended to be the children of up-scale urban professionals. But a solid core had been transferred from an adjoining scraper, one that had more than its share of low-pay, semiskilled workers and their children. Josh couldn't make friends among the kids like "him" because they had all been going to school together for years and had closed ranks in protection against the "new" kids. Josh, by default, was considered a "new" kid but the children of the relative "poor" had little or no use for some snotty brain. Except as a punching bag.

	He figured this out after about a week and quit trying. Most of the bullying came from the low-class kids so he avoided them as much as possible. It was a tightrope every day of school and it was wearing him to a frazzle. No friends in a school where people pretty much ignored you was one thing. No friends in one where you needed them to back you up was hell.

	He slouched through the door of the apartment and went to his room, not even bothering to go by the kitchen and to try to cadge a snack. He had another stupid writing assignment due in the morning and it was driving him nuts. He'd figured out that he could use the plant to paint the words better than he could actually write them. He actually had the assignment memed. All he needed was a printer but they cost like a gazillion credits. The only one he could get to was at school and he'd tried the old "I wrote it at home and scanned it dodge" only to be told to go get the original. What he needed was a dog to eat his homework.

	He got out the paper he'd been writing on, which had about a hundred tears in it, and frowned. He really, really didn't want to write right now. It hurt his hands and he was embarrassed by the way the words looked. He kicked off his sneakers, which ran to the closet and put themselves away, and then lay down on his float bed, closing his eyes and bringing up a book by some guy called "Dickens." It was really old, almost as old as Tarzan, but it was pretty good.

	He opened his eyes when his dad came home and pinged him to say hi. Then he closed them again until he heard the magic word: "project."

	He crept to the room iris and put his ear against it. He could hear them talking, faintly.

	"Nari ..."

	"Nari? Accompanied?"

	"If we want. It's a minimum two year project."

	"But ... Nari? That's ..."

	"In the Peshawn sector, I know. But there are some choices. It's either double my Terra salary or I can take one and a half with benefits. The benefits are housing allowance for spouse, a generous one, and a driver. I can probably swing an education allowance since there are no public schools. There are travel benefits, too. One ticket back to Terra per year for myself and one on the odd six months to Charon Sector or equivalent for myself and family. You get to travel, Jala; I know you've wanted to. And the pay is ... great."

	"The pay would be great and we need it; we're barely keeping up with the Visam Card payments. But ... Nari ... That's sort of ..."

	They moved away towards the kitchen and Josh frowned. "Nari." What the hell, or where the hell rather, was Nari?

	He carefully accessed the net. His parents had all the usual filters in place but looking a place up wasn't going to get him in trouble. Unless they caught what he was looking up. He never talked about his eavesdropping but when you didn't know from one day to the next where you were going to be sleeping, eavesdropping became a habit.

	Nari ... too many hits. Nari, place. No. Nari ... geographical ... Nothing. Where on Terra was Nari? It didn't ring a bell. Nari. Okay, just go through them. Popular singer. Most of those sites were blocked for some reas ... oh. Woo-hoo!

	He spent a little time accessing some sites on the pop-singer Nari Senescenes. Two bangles and a feather, INDEED. My.

	But that didn't tell him where they were moving. Or maybe moving. Nari. What did Dad say? Peshawn? Ah. Nari. The Narians. Try that.

	Nari, a planet in the Peshawn Sector ...

	WE'RE GOING OFF-PLANET!

	Oh, man, but look at those natives ... UUUUUUG-LEE.

	"Nari is a planet in the Peshawn Sector," Josh said, tooling the data and throwing up a holopic of the sector then zeroing in on Nari. "It's a hot world which has a green sun. It's mostly arid—that's dry like a desert. The natives are insectoid forms, ten extremities, including two true arms and two false arms, a curved head sort of like a banana ..."

	When he'd told his social studies teacher where they were going she'd asked him to do a presentation for the class. And herself. With as many planets as were known to Terra, she couldn't keep up with all of them. The teacher seemed interested but most of the kids were bored. Until he got to the next bit.

	"The Narians reproduce by implanting their eggs in mammalform hosts," he said, showing a video of the implantation. The Narian looked something like a giant wasp and the ovipositor it extended appeared to be about two meters long. "When the eggs hatch, the babies eat their way out of the hosts ..." And, sure enough, there was a tridee of the young Narian bursting out of the side of a thing that looked like a six legged cow.

	"Oh, gross!" "Cool!" "Are you going to get eaten, Josh?"

	"Okay, Josh," the teacher said, hurriedly, shutting off the video as the baby Narian extended a labial probe and began ripping chunks out of the shuddering former host. "Thank you very much for that ... interesting presentation ..."

	"The Toolecks had a war with them about fifty years ago ..." Josh continued.

	"That's enough, Josh."

	Josh had only been at a spaceport a couple of times before. They'd shuttled up to visit his Nana in one of the orbital nursing homes once and had a vacation on the Terraformed Mars colony. Other than that, all his traveling had been on Terra and most of that by aircar.

	But now here he was in the Bowan Spaceport, getting ready to head to Nari via Toolecks. All he knew about Toolecks was that the people there were one of Terra's staunchest allies and they had five eyes. They all spoke Terran with a funny accent, but it was going to be neat.

	"You're going to be well over gross cubage, ma'am," the cargo-bot said as the floater transferred their bags to the conveyor.

	"Check our record," Jala replied politely, as if the machine was a human. "We're cleared for excess cubic."

	Mom had bought him gobs of clothes because she didn't know what she could get in Nari. Not only clothes that fit but some that were too big so he could grow into them. It made a respectable pile of bags.

	After they got cleared by the baggage handling system Mom headed for the gates. They passed through the security tunnel then down a bounce tube to the lower levels. That was when Josh started to pick out the aliens.

	There was a group of spiderlike Grantin, clustering together as if to avoid the horrible mammalforms around them. There was a tall, spindly Barick, striding through the crowd waiting for the tram. A couple of Toolecks, short and lobsterlike with five eyes extended on eye-stalks, waving their mandibles and clacking away in Tool.

	There were more. Harons and Sjoglun and Beetoids and Nalo and ... too many to count and in all different shapes, sizes and colors. It was just so cool.

	Dad joined them as the grav tram arrived. He'd been held up by a ping from his home-office. But they got on the tram together, careful to take the oxy-nitrogen sector one, and headed for the out-terminal.

	"Problem?" Jala said as they hung onto the grab bars. There was a stabilization field so those were more for psychological benefit than anything.

	"Bank of Heteran wouldn't take the transfer," Steve replied, shrugging. "So we're going to be paid through Bank of Donlon on Tooleck. Not a problem, there's a branch in Heteran and you can access from anywhere on Nari. But you'd better get used to the fact that Nari uses more physcreds than Terra or Tooleck. They've got a local money called the rayel and they mean real money. Sheets with the local ruler's face graved on them."

	"How ... interesting," Jala said, her eyes widening.

	"You can carry enough to get around in your pouch," Steve said, shrugging. "And hotels and things in Heteran will take Visam or a Bank of Donlon ... well it's a piece of plastrip with writing on it called a 'cheque.' You fill in how much money you're paying them and then thumb it. Hand it over to them and it's like doing a trans but you have to keep track of them so you don't overdraw the account. We'll pick some up in Tooleck while we're there and I'll get one of their comps to explain it to you. Bank of Donlon 'cheques' are accepted in some of the strangest places." He paused and grinned. "Welcome to the Outer Limits, honey."

	"Hey, Dad?" Josh said. "Can I get some of those rayel?"

	"We'll see, squirt," Steve said, rubbing his head. "We'll see. You're going to be in a different part of the ship from us, Josh, you know that?"

	"I am?" Josh said, his eyes widening.

	"Yes, you're going to be up front," Jala replied. "I'm going to be riding with your father in the back. Don't worry; you'll be fine."

	"Okay," Josh said as the tram pulled into the R terminal. They got out and went up another bounce tube to the terminal then through an emigration scanner to ensure they weren't carrying any of the fourteen billion, one hundred and twenty three million known forms of replicating biologicals and hazardous nannites. The scanner buzzed on a Sjoglun ahead of them and the floor opened up under the large caterpillarlike creature, dropping it into a bouce tube and down to the medical quarantine facility.

	"No danger, ma'am," the Youtoon beetling the terminal shrilled by rubbing two of his back legs together. "Just a minor case of Purple Spot Fever. Not contagious to Terraoids. Move along, please."

	When they reached the gate area they took a tube to the Gamma boarding level for oxy-nitrogen, 10 kps gravity, travelers. Then his mom led him over to a roped off section.

	"This is my son, Josh," Jala said to the Tooleck attendant. "He's boarding in first class, oxy-nitrogen Terra/Tooleck mix."

	"Yes, Mrs. Parker, I have the note in my memory," the Tooleck said, bending down to Josh's level and waving all five eyes at him. "Hello, Josh. Is this the first time you've been in a spaceship?"

	"Nah," Josh said, puffing up his chest. "I've been to the orbital colonies and Mars before!"

	"We're going to Tooleck for a couple of days," Jala said nervously. "Then on to Nari."

	"Nari!" the attendant said, whistling through his breathing snout. "That's a long way, Josh, nearly six thousand light years! You're going to have fun, aren't you!"

	"That's right," Josh said. "And I get to stay out of school till we find a house!"

	"Always a pleasure," the Tooleck said, whistling in humor. "We'll take good care of him, Mrs. Parker. Josh, why don't you sit over by that Sjoglun over there where I can keep an eye on you."

	"Okay," Josh said, skipping over to the seat.

	The Sjoglun was about the size of a rhinoceros and looked something like a gray caterpillar, with a tapered tail and head. It had ten stubby legs that were stretched across two sets of conformable chairs and eighteen more stubby pseudo arms ranging from about the length of a human forearm near the base to very small ones the size of a hand at the upper quadrant. It was rocking back and forth with all fourteen compound eyes on short, retractable, eyestalks waving in different directions and appeared to be asleep.

	"Hi!" Josh said, jumping into the seat next to it and leaning back as the seat figured out his squirmy body conformation. "I'm going to Tooleck! My name's Josh!"

	"We are all going to Tooleck, young Terran," the Sjoglund grunted, whistling faintly from spicules along the side by Josh and rotating a handful of eyes in his direction. "And my name is ..." it let out a complex whistle.

	Josh tried to whistle the name and then gave up.

	"I'm just gonna call you Pilly, okay?" Josh said. "I can't say that name."

	"That is fine young Terran," the Sloglund replied. "Few Terrans can. And how old are you, young Terran?"

	"I'm ten!" Josh said. "I'm in fifth grade. Well, not right now, I'm out of school until we get to Nari and find a house!"

	"Ten!" the Sjoglund said, whistling from both sides of his body. "Why, you are barely a grub! When I was ten, I had not yet come of mind. You are lucky to be traveling so young, Terran. There is much you can learn, in school or out of school."

	"I guess," Josh said. "Hey, what's Purple Spot Fever?"

	"Why?" the Sjoglund said, suspiciously.

	"The guy in front of me at security had it," Josh said and was amazed at the speed with which the massive creature could move. "Nice talking to you!" Josh yelled at the retreating form. "Bye!"

	Josh watched the world dwindling into space until the stars began to move faster and faster. Just as promised, the ones to the front got red and the ones to the rear got blue and then they vanished. What was left was a swirling purple like the stuff you got with your eyes closed if you weren't reading or meming or something.

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the captain said in a clipped Fordoss Galactica accent. "The ship has entered hyperspace and you may now unbuckle your restraints and feel free to move about the cabin. Please keep minimal restraints in place when seated in case we encounter subspace turbulence or black holes."

	Josh tapped the command and the enveloping body cover retracted into the seat. Then he leaned the seat back and closed his eyes. It was a pretty good book but it had been a long day and eventually he went to sleep.

Chapter Three
When In Rome

	"Excuse me, young sir," the Tooleck said, prodding at his arm.

	Josh opened his eyes and looked out the window but they were still in hyperspace.

	"Mwuff?" he said, sitting up. "Sorry, I must have fallen asleep."

	"Here is a hot towel," the Tooleck said. "Dinner will be served in a few cycles." It was apparently a Tooleck female, slightly larger than the males and less ornate in body etching with the blue and green stylized starship of Tooleck Spaceways graved on her carapace. She handed him a towel and then turned to the seats across the aisle from him continuing her service.

	Josh washed his face and hands with the hot towel and then rubbed the back of his neck. That not being enough, he dug in both ears, washed behind them for the first time in months, then stuck the towel up under his shirt and gave himself a good rub-down. When he finished the formerly white towel was a dark gray with some yellow etching.

	He dropped it in the basket as the attendant came back through and then decided to look around at his fellow travelers. There were two Terrans across the aisle from him, an older man and a girl Josh figured was his daughter. They didn't look alike or anything, but she was way younger than he was. She was really pretty, too, but kind of old, maybe twenty, wearing "two bangles and a feather," with her hands folded demurely on her lap and her eyes closed. Reading, tooling or meming, not sleeping, from the ways her eyes were moving under their lids.

	Josh caught the man looking at him and he looked kind of angry. So Josh decided to look somewhere else. He lifted himself up on his seat and looked at the seats behind him. There was another couple, there, two catlike Nalo, a male and a female. Again, the male must have been the dad because he had the really deep black fur of an older Nalo with gray around the jowls. The female was younger, Josh couldn't even guess how young, with light tan, thin, fur. She was reading a pad, one pointed ear twitching occasionally. Nalo mostly wore a sort of long robe but hers was short, barely reaching the tops of her thighs and was cut low in the front so he could see her cleavage. It was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen. When she inhaled the little hairs on her breasts sort of bristled.

	After a moment, as if reading his mind, she looked up from the pad. He grinned at her and she slowly drew her lips back, revealing a mouth full of perfectly formed, extremely sharp, teeth. He wasn't too sure about Nalo expressions, but he didn't think it was a smile. So he smiled again, lips closed, sheepishly, and slid back down the back of his chair.

	The fresher was at the front of the compartment so he strolled up there and did his business. There were instructions in Galacta explaining how a human should use the flusher. He followed them carefully, confused and, at times, horrified by some of the other instructions. When he was done he wandered more slowly down the aisle, looking at his fellow passengers.

	Most of them were Tooleck and most of those were females, probably businesswomen from the pads and chart-holos. There were a couple of lizardlike Jootan, one of them sitting right next to an Adoo! He wondered if the sluglike Adoo was being taken to the Jootan salt-mines but probably not. The war had been over for a looong time. Terra and the Toolecks won, beating the Jootan and the Ortulians over a sixty parsec sector, and the Adoo had mostly moved to Goolagam which was their ancestral world. It had been taken over by Adyl while they were gone, since they'd lost control of it nearly three thousand years before to the Yemnor, and there'd been quite a few wars there since they'd moved back. Each of which the Adoo had won with embarrassing ease given that the Adyl were about three meters tall, heavily armored insectoids related to Narians. Getting beat up by a bunch of slugs had to be embarrassing. It wasn't far from Nari, come to think of it.

	He'd just started to close his eyes to read again when the Tooleck stewards started serving dinner. A tray extruded from the back of the seat in front of him with the dinner covered by a crystal-plas warmer. When he took it off he sighed; proto-carb chicken in some sort of sauce. He picked up the prongs and prodded at it. Yep, proto-carb, had to be. No real chicken was ever that rubbery.

	It was pretty good, though; the sauce was creamy and not spicy. There were noodles in some sort of cheese sauce, too. He avoided the vegetables on the basis that anything green had to be bad for you. There was some sort of fruit, though. It was kind of funny, sort of like an orange but purple and with a really thick rind. When he got that off, by biting into it with his somewhat prominent incisors and tearing, which he'd gotten good at in Papua, he found that the interior was filled with little globes. He popped one in his mouth, suspiciously, and was pleased to find that it was something like a kumquat, sweet and tangy at the same time. He ate all the little globes, greedily, getting juice all over his hands. But there was another warm towel in the tray and he used that to clean up.

	When he was done he tooled the command and the tray folded back up along with his mess. Well, except for the stuff that had gotten on his clothes which he brushed off onto the floor. Small buglike bots scuttled out of the walls and picked up the debris, unnoticed.

	Fed and happy he checked his plant and saw that they were about three quarters of the way to Tooleck, passing over the last bit of the Canalit Rift. They were just approaching Re'as, an underdeveloped planet that had been settled by Toolecks several thousand years ago. The Re'as were hostile towards the Toolecks, which had conquered them as part of the far-spanning, and fast decaying, Tooleck Empire. The Tooleck were in the process of slowly withdrawing from Re'as and not enjoying the experience. Re'as terrorists were always blowing up air-car bombs in Donlon or shooting Tooleck soldiers or something else to express their general dissatisfaction with the Toolecks.

	On the other hand, when the Re'as weren't fighting the Toolecks they were fighting each other or singing about fighting or wandering around the galaxy as mercenaries or casual muscle. They called it "following the wild besleem." They spoke a version of heavily accented Galactica that was fairly similar to Tooleck, but coarser and, in extreme versions, nearly incomprehensible.

	Josh kicked his feet and wondered what to do next. He had a couple of hundred books loaded in his plant but he really didn't feel like reading. He'd decided that spacing was boring. So much for being a spacer. Nothing but hyperspace to look at most of the time. What he wanted to be was ... rich. Rich enough to buy a planet. Rich enough that he'd have a girlfriend like that Nalo girl, with really fine fur.

	He brought up a tooling about the Second Orion war and spliced himself in as an Insertion Commando. The mission was to rescue ... a pretty Nalo girl, a member of the resistance, who was being held by the Jootan secret police. He'd just gotten through the ludicrous Jootan defenses around their headquarters and burst into the room where the Nalo girl was tied up and being threatened by black-clad Jootan police when the tooling was automatically saved.

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the Tooleck captain said, "we are approaching hyperjunction with Tooleck at this time. Please disengage all net connections and configure your comfort zones for landing."

	Josh sighed and triggered the restraints, squirming a little as the plastic wrapped across his body, legs and forehead. He could turn his head to the side and he watched as the purple of hyperspace gave way to shifted stars and then the pinpricks came together into normal looking pins of light. The G class star of Tooleck was briefly visible as the window automatically polarized to prevent blinding. The ship was pointed at Tooleck on the way in but as they approached the planet it banked to enter the landing pattern and Josh got his first glimpse of a new planet.

	It looked ... gray.

	"It's cold!" Jala said, wrapping her arms around herself. She was wearing a light environment cape but the warmer was having to really work in the brumous conditions in Donlon. The rain was sheeting down as they waited under a force dome for an aircab and she shivered and pulled Josh to her.

	"We didn't bring any clothes for this," she said.

	"My fault," Steve answered, shrugging. He was wearing a slightly heavier environment jacket and frowned as he saw Josh shiver. "We'll go to the hotel and then order some appropriate clothes. I'd forgotten it was autumn year in Donlon."

	The pad they were waiting at gave a good view of the city of Donlon and to Josh the place looked not much different from Bowan. Fewer megascrapers and a cluster of very low buildings near the middle, but pretty much block after block of big buildings. It actually looked like Bowan, the part they'd lived in, in the winter. Lots of cold rain and fog.

	"Revod Hotel," his father said when the cabrank got to them.

	"Please to place your luggage in the boot," the cabbot said in a weird accent. "Your" came out as "you were." "Pleace to plass you were loogadge in ter boot."

	"Why's it sound like that?" Josh said as he tossed his bag in the trunk of the cab.

	"That's what most of the local Toolecks sound like," his dad answered. "It's called Norky."

	"Cool," Josh said as he settled into the conformal backseat.

	"Where you from, guvnor?" the cabbot said as it lifted into the air.

	"Terra," Steve answered.

	"Well, uh course, guvnor," the cabbot said. "Where 'bouts?"

	"Bowan," Josh said. "Last. We travel a lot. We were in Papua before that."

	"Papua!" the cabbot said. "Got a mate works in Papua as a loader. Name of C4T7J315. Don't suppose you ran into him, eh?"

	"No, sorry," Steve said. "Doesn't ring a bell. Knew a Norky dozerbot named D89Y4I673, though."

	"Revod Hotel's a swank place," the cab burbled. "Not far from Seak Park. Got to watch the changing of the guards, guvnor. The larva would enjoy it."

	"We'll see," Jala said, looking out at the misting rain. "Don't you have weather controls, here?"

	"Yes, missus," the cab said. "This is what we like for weather!"

	The Revod Hotel turned out to be a series of two-story buildings taking up about a half block of prime commercial real estate. Josh couldn't believe that somebody hadn't already built a megascraper on it. Dad would clear the area in a heartbeat.

	They pulled in under a portico that didn't even have a force screen and the cold mist and rain hit them as soon as they got out of the cab. Mom handled the transfer while he and Dad got the luggage and dumped it on one of the waiting bellhops.

	"Right this way, guvnor," the float said, spinning around and heading for the plascrys doors.

	The hop led them through the lobby and to a bounce tube at the rear of the building, then up to the second floor and down a corridor to one of the outbuildings. The corridor was surrounded by dripping plascrys and Josh could see that small gardens were set between the buildings. The vegetation was mostly purple and looked like variations on moss and ferns.

	"Room B 219, guvnor," the hop said as they reached the room. The door was wood on hinges, something Josh had only seen in historical movies.

	His dad keyed the lock and showed Josh and Jala how to use the doorknob thingy. There was only one bed and the fresher had some fixtures Josh had never seen.

	"What's that?" Josh asked, pointing at one of them. It looked like a seat with a spike on it.

	"That's for ... Tooleck," his dad said, hastily. "You don't want to use it. And I'd better explain the fresher controls. You really don't want to hit the third button, son. Hop, we'll need a float bed for my son as well."

	"I'll get one for the tyke right away, guvnor," the hop said then cleared his voice circuits. "Hem ..."

	"Sorry," Josh's dad said and transferred a tip.

	"Right away, guvnor," the hop said, floating out of the room.

	"Wow! A fountain," Josh said, examining the controls on the fresher.

	"That's for ... Nalo, son," his dad said, shutting down the jet of water that was coming out of the commode. "Females."

	"And what's the third ... OH, MY GOD!" Josh shouted as a claw came up out of the bottom of the commode, snapped at air and yanked downwards.

	"I told you not to hit the third button!" his dad snapped. "Especially if you're sitting down!"

	"That would of ..."

	"Yes," Steve said, exasperatedly. "It's an Adoo setting. Just ... go check what they have on the tridee, okay? I think there's a human circuit."

	Josh sighed and went to the tridee, sitting on the end of the bed and tooling it with his plant. He looked at the selections and pulled up Manny and Butch, a police show that had been extremely popular on Terra ... five years ago. Since it was in a prime-time slot it was apparently brand new to the Toolecks. He watched an episode he'd seen at least three times before for a couple of minutes, mouthing the words to one scene, and was just about to change the channel when it cut to commercial.

	A ... very pretty girl with brown hair and ... well ... really ... uhm ... was holding up a bottle of something.

	"Libro," she whispered, huskily. "Libro ... for ... men."

	"Aaah," Josh whimpered, absolutely positive that the next thing he was going to do was go out and buy some Libro ... whatever it was ... "So that's what nipples look like ... I didn't know they were pink ..."

	"What?" Jala said, turning around from where she'd been unpacking. "Joshua Damley Parker! What are you watching?!"

	"A commercial," Josh said, reverently, as the channel was changed. "Oh, Mommm."

	Breakfast was another new experience.

	"Well," Josh's dad said, scanning the menu. "They've got ... quite a selection ..."

	"What are nanhuch or what is a nanhuch ..." Josh asked, hesitantly.

	"Uhm ... you wouldn't like it," his dad said. "The intestines of something like a local pig, looks more like an ant, stuffed with its book-lungs."

	"Ooooo!"

	"Better than haggis, trust me. Try the iravo [*Belly steaks of the jumis worm, a large maggotlike creature used for reprocessing of edible garbage.], that ought to be safe," his dad said. "And some ... ollien [*Regurgitation of same. So is honey.] That's ... sort of like porridge ..."

	The iravo when it was served by a botwaiter turned out to be strips of ... well probably meat. Fried. They were chewy but tasty. The ollien looked a lot like oatmeal.

	"What's this made of?" Josh asked, suspiciously.

	"Sort of wheat," his dad said, clearing his throat. "Put some of the keatle syrup [*Sort of honey. Sort of. Don't ask.] on it. That will ... help."

	There was a big pot of the stuff in the middle of the table and Josh suspiciously stuck a finger on some of the green viscous liquid that was stuck running down the outside. He licked the stuff nervously and then smiled.

	"Hey! It's corn syrup!" he said, happily.

	"Close enough," his dad replied. Dad was having the nanhuch. It smelled like fish.

	After a breakfast of iravo slices and ollien with lots of keatle syrup, Josh was ready to admit that Tooleck wasn't quite the barbarian planet it had first seemed. Gosh knows they had some decent tridee channels.

	Darohs was a famous shopping mall that was just down the street from the Revod Hotel. After breakfast and daring a brief break in the rain, the underdressed threesome darted down the street to the store.

	Josh's dad picked up a heavier environment coat and Josh, after whining to get a fake lizibe fur cape just like Cilo the Barbarian wore, settled on a blue and green toggle button coat made from some weird, rough, material. It had a hood, and when he pulled it up he could pretend he was Cilo the Barbarian, making his way through the northern wastes and battling ice-worms. His mom at first was going to get an environment coat like his father and then Dad talked her into buying a fake neganah fur coat. It was light blue and glowed like fire under the sun-paint. She turned around in it, looking at it from all sides in the view screens and sighed.

	"It's too much," she said.

	"We can afford it," Steve replied. "We'll be able to, anyway. You like it, right?"

	"Yes," she said, sighing again. "Okay."

	"Josh, your mother and I have to go to the bank," his dad said as they exited the store. "You might as well stay in the hotel."

	"I might as well go with you," Josh said unhappily. "You locked out all the good channels on the tridee. I'll just ... read or something."

	"Fine, but don't interfere or pester people," his dad said.

	They took a cab to the bank, which was a low, stone building and Josh waited on a humanoform chair while his mom and dad talked to an Adoo. About half the people working in the bank were Tooleck and the rest seemed to be Adoo and Terrans.

	Josh watched them talking for a while and then closed his eyes to read. Finally, they were done. It seemed to take hours. But when he checked his clock it was less than 45 minutes.

	"Let's go, Josh," his dad said. "I've rented an air car and we're going sightseeing."

	"In this?" Josh said as they stepped out of the bank. The rain had turned to sleet mixed with snow. The wind had picked up as well and icicles were forming on the traffic markers.

	"Yes," his dad replied, dryly. "I checked the weathercomp and there's some procession today, something to do with the Queen. They wanted just the right weather for it so it will stay this way until at least tomorrow. Apparently they were forced to have some clearing, then, but it's going to get colder. Today we're going to go to some ruins, Rockdeng they call it, because we sure as heck don't want to go tomorrow."

	"Rocks and sleet," Josh said. "What a perfect combination."

	Rockdeng, when they made it, turned out to be really cool. It was set in the middle of a big open plain of purple grass and while there was a power-fence around it, tourists were free to wander through the area. There was just something about the arrangement of big, weathered, green-stone rocks that made him wonder.

	Josh wandered around the assembly, climbing on rocks, carefully, it was still sleeting, looking up at rocks and generally having a fine time until his mom memed his plant and downloaded the standard historic spiel. Just for giggles he decided to access it.

	Rockdeng, it turned out, was created by prehistoric Tooleck, possibly as a form of early solar calendar. The stones had come from more than sixty kilometers away and were pulled there by hand or possibly using early domesticated animals. The animals they showed looked like giant ants and there was a toolie of them dragging some stones across the plain.

	It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to figure out what day you should celebrate your birthday.

	"Greenstone is a metamorphic igneous rock," his dad said as he opened his eyes to go find more rocks to climb. "Originally an igneous rock similar to dolomite and then subjected to higher heats and pressure," Steve continued, pointing at the side of one of the rocks. "See? Very fine grain. Slow cooling."

	"Okay, Dad." Josh sighed. To his dad it seemed that everything was down to the rocks. Or, sometimes, the history of a place. Josh rarely saw his father and when he did his one image of him was of a guy sitting in a float recliner with his eyes moving, scanning some text. Most of them seemed to be history or adventure fiction.

	"It's getting late," his dad said, pinging his mom, who had been sitting on a rock patiently waiting for father and son to get done. "Let's head back to Donlon."

	It had been a two hour air-car hop to Donlon but the ride back seemed shorter.

	"Steve," Jala said, when they got back to the hotel and had released the car to go park itself, "we've hardly seen anything of Donlon. Let's go look around."

	"Okay," Steve said, shrugging. The temperature was hovering right at five degrees Celsius, but they were well dressed for the weather. "Let's find something to eat, though. I'm starved."

	"I'm sure we'll find a restaurant or something," Jala said, putting her arm through his. "But Donlon's such a fascinating city. So much history. It seems a shame to not look around."

	A city was pretty much a city to Josh but he had to admit that there was something different about Donlon. Part of it was that the Tooleck seemed to walk more than Terrans; the streets were packed with them as the threesome made their way through the crowds. Most of them weren't wearing environment coats but they all seemed to carry rellas like Terrans carried pads. And for much the same reason, apparently, because they had to use them just about as frequently.

	It was after dark, or maybe it was the incessant cloud-cover, but all the shops were open and it seemed his mother had to stop in every single one. She didn't buy much but she had a great time looking.

	"Honey," Jala said, coming out of a shop that sold intricate jewelrylike timepieces designed to be planted on the Tooleck carapace. "I want to go to Offacro Road."

	"They'll probably be closing up by the time we get there," Steve warned.

	"I still want to see it," Jala said.

	"Okay, okay, we'll take the tube."

	They caught a gravtube to another part of town, took a bounce-tube down to ground level and then stepped out on Offacro Road.

	The road was lined by buildings, most of them less than ten stories tall and all connected by walkways and catwalks. And it seemed to be one giant mall. But what a mall. No laser fitters for clothing here. No, the clothes were laid out on floaters with Toolecks and Adoo and bots shouting in competition to be heard. Clothes and jewelry and just ... stuff.

	"Oh, wow!" Josh said, darting to one of the open shops and pointing in the window. "A real, honest-to-gosh forty-watt plasma rifle!"

	"It's a nonfunctional replica," Steve said, glancing at it. "They drill the barrel and the charging coils so it can't be used. Thousands of them got dumped after the Orion War."

	"A bookstore!" Josh shouted, dashing across the street. The door was locked, the proprietor having apparently gone home early, or, it being a bookstore on Offacro Road, maybe not having come in all day. But Josh could see dozens, hundreds of real paper books in the store. Then he looked at some of the prices and gulped. Let's see. If he saved his allowance for fifty years ...

	Mirrors and pottery and handcrafts from a thousand worlds. Jewelry for wear or implantation. Plant shops where anyone from a Terran to a Vacalu could be implanted in a matter of minutes with anything from a Covas V to a Mamorak 3000 with the special tooling coprocessor.

	"They say you can buy anything on Offacro Road," his dad said as his mother was dickering for what was purported to be an authentic Yemnor brooch. If it was it had to be at least five thousand years old. "Anything from a map to the Holy Grail to a fleet of destroyers."

	"Gosh," Josh said. "How much would just one destroyer cost?" With just one destroyer he could ... well, rather than listing the things he couldn't do it would be easier to list the things he could. Taking over the Terran Federation was out, but other than that ...

	"More than I make, Josh," his dad said, leaning over to whisper. "And stay close. Because one of the things they sell, or so it is said, is ... special food. There are some species that think that ... young Terrans are especially tasty." His dad waggled his eyebrows and winked. "What do you think about that?"

	Josh thought about this for a second and shrugged.

	"I bet that shop that had the nonfunctional plasma rifle knows where you can buy a real one, Dad," he replied, whispering back. "Maybe we should get one."

	"Not on Tooleck, son," his dad said, laughing. "They really frown on that sort of thing."

	"Speaking of food," Josh said, his stomach rumbling.

	"I don't think I can get that," his mom said. "It had better be authentic for what that Kaffo wanted for it. I don't see many restaurants ..."

	"You don't go to restaurants on Offacro Road!" his dad said, grinning. "There's a vendor just down there."

	The vendor was a Lemnor, a ratlike being with red fur and beady black eyes. He was banging on the floater beside him with a pair of tongs.

	"NAMERSH! Get your namersh right here! Hot and fresh! FRESH namersh!"

	"I'll take a namersh," Josh's dad said. "These are really good," he added.

	"What are they?" Josh asked, suspiciously.

	"They're like ... sort of Tooleck hot dogs," his dad replied. "They've even got mustard. I'll have mine with mustard, onions and rask [*A hot spicy condiment extracted from the fecal matter of the Sinok beast.]." 

	"Right you are, guvnor," the Lemnor said in a squeaky voice. He pulled a long brown thing that looked like a very oddly shaped potato out of an oven on the side of the floater, then cut the end off with a swift flash of a viblade and stuck the thing on a long spike. The entire process seemed to be one continuous motion. He held the open end of the thing under three of at least a dozen spigots, shooting mustard, chopped onions and what must have been "rask," a purple viscous fluid, into the hole in the thing. Last he opened up the top of a steaming tureen and pulled out a yellowish brown tube. The tube was stuffed in the hole in the potato-thing and the Lemnor held up a finger.

	"That's a dib, guvnor," he said, diffidently.

	"The price has gone up since the last time I was in Donlon, then," Steve said, frowning. "It used to be a quatro!"

	"Well, it's the price of rask, isn't it? And onions, now onions those are just out of this ... well, they're from Terra aren't they? Taxes are terrible. Cutting my own throat at that. But, seeing as how it's you, I'll say ... half dib and that's flat."

	"Quatro, and six," Josh' dad said. "Not a pin more."

	"You've got me over a barrel, guv," the Lemnor whined. "I've already made it up and all. Have to eat it myself and explain to my partner where our sliver of profit's gone. Nine less sixty-three. Can't do less! And that's cutting me own throat!"

	"Tell you what," Steve said, shaking his head. "I know you've got pups ..."

	"Squeakers, guv, nine of them and their mother ill ..."

	"So, a dib and quatro for three, and that's flat. Or you'll have to eat your profit."

	"Guv, you're a friend in need," the Lemnor said, holding out his paw for the money.

	"Transfer?" Steve asked.

	"With those fees?" the Lemnor squeaked. "It's ten percent over and I'll have to go to Mert the Butcher ..."

	"Oh, very well," Steve said, reaching into his pouch and pulling out a handful of metal coins. "Let's see, that's a quatro, three quatros and a nine make a dib and a six [*This interaction makes more sense if the reader is familiar with pre-Decimal English currency. In this case, four quatro equal a dib and ten pins or one hundred and twenty-six pins and a slup. Again, don't ask. Among other things, it's base seven.] ..."

	Finally the complicated money and food transaction was complete. Jala got mustard and ketchup and Josh got just ketchup. He'd just taken a bite out of the namersh, and been favorably pleased, when the Lemnor shook his head in sadness.

	"Been a good night," he muttered then looked up in horror. "Not that I'm making money or anything, it seems like the more I make the less I ..."

	"I understand," Steve said, taking another bite and starting to walk away.

	"Got to fill the tureen back up, though," the Lemnor said, pulling out a bucket and reaching in with his tongs.

	What he lifted out of the bucket looked like nothing so much as a giant tong full of quarter meter maggots. They were long and thin ...

	The rodentoid raised the lid on the tureen and dropped them in to the sound of high-pitched squealing just as Josh realized what he was eating.

	"Try to get it in the scuppers, guvnor!" the Lemnor called out to him. "It helps feed the breeders!"

Chapter Four
Ignorance Really Is Bliss

	"Josh, you have to understand," his dad said calmly. "The Toolecks are a very efficient race. They discovered advanced biology and medicine comparatively early in their development and lagged behind in ... hard sciences like physics and engineering. So they had a population problem well before Terra, developmentally. And the way they solved it was by—"

	"Growing worms!" Josh said. "Worms you eat! We've been eating worm meat."

	"It tastes the same, Josh," his dad said patiently as his mother could be heard vomiting in the bathroom.

	"It's worms!"

	"Josh," his dad said, with a hint less patience and possibly some trepidation since his wife had quit throwing up and was probably going to be emerging from the bathroom, soon, with less than friendly intentions, "Nari doesn't import any food worth talking about from Terra. Most of it comes from Tooleck or Nalo or Jootan and, Josh, you really don't want me explaining Nalo food to you. So you're going to have to get used to it. Worm meat tastes just like chicken or pork. It's that or starve."

	"I'm gonna starve, then," Josh said, his eyes wide. "I'm going to waste away and die. At least there's ollien and keatle."

	"Right," Steve said, nodding his head sagely. "Wheat and corn syrup. It's got a lot of nutrition in it, too. Good for you. Helps you ... grow. You'll do fine."

	"Iravo!" Josh said, suddenly. "That's worm meat!" He clapped a hand over his mouth and headed for the bathroom. "Mom!" he said in a muffled tone, pounding on the door. "Mom! Lemme in! Quick!"

	Josh picked at his ollien and glared at the iravo. The problem was, it was good. He picked up a piece and looked at it, frowning.

	His dad was being really quiet this morning and they'd ordered breakfast in the room. His mom was apparently dieting again since she'd ordered nothing. She'd gone to visit Neorak with his father on a project and lost nearly twenty kilos. The Neorakans use really complicated eating utensils and she'd blamed it on those. Of course, he'd heard that Neorakan noodles were really dried worms. But he'd put it down to a rumor until yesterday.

	He bit a piece of the iravo off and chewed on it, thoughtfully, suppressing an automatic gag reaction.

	"It's not that bad, Mom," he said, swallowing and suppressing the gag reaction again. "And the ollien is okay. Try it with the keatle syrup."

	"I don't ... maybe a little of the iravo." After Josh was firmly asleep Jala had insisted on a precise briefing on local foodstuffs. After which her stomach was empty of not only dinner and breakfast but everything she'd eaten for the last year. Which meant she was very hungry and likely to starve to death. And she'd thought Neorak was bad.

	"What's on the schedule for today?" she asked weakly, picking at a piece of iravo.

	"I arranged a tour of the Tooleck temples," Steve said. "They're amazing architecture and have some tricky foundation problems in places ..."

	Josh had to admit that "amazing" was the word for Simonan Temple. It was the last of four they were visiting and it was ... well ... awesome.

	The temples were made from a volcanic glass that was found only on Tooleck. The glass had very high strength properties, as he'd been told three times so far, and was easily workable. The temple was almost seventy meters to the ceiling of the nave, with flying buttresses of colored glass, and the weak sun gleamed through the walls and ceiling. All of the glass was colored so that throughout the day and year the colors blended and shifted. The effect was something like walking through a rainbow and Josh had never felt the way he did now, just walking down the aisle from one strange hue to the next.

	"Look here, Josh," his dad said excitedly, pointing up to a spot near where the bell tower joined with the south wall. "See that?"

	"It looks like it's ... welded," Josh said. There was a thicker spot on the wall.

	"It is," his dad said, grinning. "This thing almost came apart about two thousand years ago. That was before the Tooleck were space travelers and right after the temple was built. They built it on bad soil and the south tower, which weighs right at fourteen thousand kips, started to sink. It took them nearly a hundred years to figure out a way to stabilize it. Told you they were lagging in engineering research. All they had to do was backfill it first. Maybe pile it. They ended up grouting it but they had to restabilize it about two centuries ago. Now there's a grav generator in it to reduce the weight."

	"So, you're saying that it could fall over any time the power went out?" Josh said.

	"Well ..." Steve paused with an abstracted look on his face. "Hopefully not today."

	The Tooleck buried their dead in glass catacombs that were up to ten stories high. The ones around the temple were smaller and old, but you could see the dessicated bodies in them. Each of the cubicles had an inscription on the front, and his dad dragged him over to one that had a special plate set on the ground in front of it.

	"This is the Tooleck poet Gobasan," his dad said excitedly. "He did some of the best poetry and stories ever written. The metal plate's because so many people come to visit his tomb. They wore out the stone and that must have been tough because it's a high olivine dolomite ..."

	Josh peered at the inscription and brought up a translation meme.

	" 'At last the talons are gone from my digits'?" he translated aloud, confused.

	"Uhm ... he was really tired of writing," his dad said sheepishly. "He said there was a monster on his back every day that made him write and the only place he would find peace was the grave."

	"Well, if he had to do it by hand I can understand," Josh said.

	After two days in Tooleck they were back on the road. Or, at least, back in the spaceport.

	From Tooleck to Nari they were taking Nari Spacelines. Josh had expected the ship to be piloted by Nari but instead, as they were being given their take-off instructions, it was clear from the accent that the pilot was a Tooleck. The stewards were Tooleck as well and one Nalo, a really cute female one in a tunic and high-cut skirt.

	His mom and dad were in the same compartment, this time, but they were sitting across the aisle from him. Seated next to him, taking up two couches, was another Sjoglun. Josh hoped that he wasn't carrying Purple Spotted Fever but he resolved not to bring it up this time.

	The ship left the spaceport on time and climbed into space rapidly. Josh didn't even get a glimpse of the planet this time and in ten minutes the pilot announced they were jumping to hyperspace.

	He was pushed gently back in his chair and watched the stars start to blue-shift ahead and then the ship slowed down and the stars shifted back to normal. It sped up again and started to rumble alarmingly and then slowed back down.

	They did this two more times and then the announcer clicked.

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the captain said in a bored tone. "I'm afraid we're going to have to check in at the nearest spacedock, what? Seems the hyperdrive has developed a bit of a tick."

	The announcement was repeated in what Josh assumed was Nari.

	The stars wheeled around them as the ship turned and then headed off, presumably back to Tooleck. From time to time the stars would blue-shift then go back to normal as the captain used the malfunctioning hyperdrive to speed up their progress. One time, Josh was sure they almost made it into hyper. Since they were pointed in, as far as he could tell, a random direction, going into hyper would have been a bad thing. They could have ended up anywhere.

	Finally, he could see the bulk of a spacedock out the window and they slid into a docking bay.

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the captain said. "It will just be a moment while our highly trained maintenance teams check over our warpcore and ensure that it is perfectly functional. Please feel free to move about the cabin but be prepared to resume your seat at any time."

	Josh had never been in a hypership dock and he was excited to get a chance to watch the ship engineers go about their business. The bay was, apparently, unpressurized because the beings moving around were in space suits. Again, most of them were Tooleck but there was one that had the distinctive outline of a Nari.

	Two Tooleck wearing the blue and gold uniforms of Tooleck Airlines vanished under the ship for a moment and then came into view towing a large silver box on a floater. The box was marked with the red and gold bird-creature of the Nari Spacelines. The top was sealed on but not airtight and a blue glow could be seen around the edges.

	"What's happening?" the Sjoglun asked, curious.

	"They pulled a box out of the ship," Josh said. "It's glowing."

	"Ah, that would be the hypercore," the Sjoglun said, craning over to look out the window.

	"Why's it glowing?" Josh asked.

	"I don't know, young Terran," the Sjoglun said politely. "I am not a hyper engineer."

	"What do you do?" Josh asked as the two Tooleck, watched by Nari wearing the red and gold of Nari Spacelines, started removing the maglinks that held the top on the core.

	"I am a seller of bathroom fixtures," the Sjoglun replied. "The Blefrib company makes the finest kunerac in the known galaxy if I may be so bold. And quite inexpensive for the quality we provide."

	"Oh," Josh said as the top came off. The reason for the blue glow was immediately apparent; the interior of the box was packed with clear tubes through which a glowing blue substance was flowing. In one spot near the right upper corner two of the globes were glowing extremely brightly as they approached one another and the blue material in one tube was flickering as it came in close proximity to that in the adjacent tube.

	The two Tooleck backed rapidly away from the box and apparently spoke by com to the Nari, who pointed at the spot and began gesticulating. The Tooleck began gesticulating back, the one on the far side of the box much more vigorously than the one by the Nari. This went on for some time until the more agitated Tooleck came around the box and grabbed the Nari by an arm, trying to drag it over to the corner. The Nari knocked the hand away with a gesture of what could be clearly read as disdain and began waving its hands again. Finally, it reached into a pouch and pulled out a roll of what appeared to be some sort of tape.

	The more agitated Tooleck had apparently had enough, picking up one of the magwrenches and charging the much larger Nari, waving the wrench overhead like a battleaxe.

	There was a brief scuffle before the less upset Tooleck managed to get his companion off the Nari. The more aggressive Tooleck was dragged away, still gesticulating and making some motions that Josh felt had more or less universal significance involving the inability of the Nari to find its tail with all ten hands.

	A much larger group composed of a mixed group of Tooleck and Nari came out. Some of the Tooleck were in red and gold and some in the colors of Tooleck Spacelines. All of the Nari wore red and gold. More digit waving commenced with some rubbing of helmets and lots of pointing and in the case of one undersized Tooleck in red and gold a certain amount of hopping up and down. Finally, consensus was reached and the Nari approached the glowing box with the roll of tape in its hands.

	Sensing something unusual was about to happen by the way the Tooleck were backing away and ducking behind large items of equipment, Josh sensibly ducked, shut his eyes and put his hands over them.

	The flash was visible even through his hands.

	When he looked back all that was left of the tape-toting Nari was a pair of smoking boots. The three Nari that stayed by the box were all on their backs and the interior of the box was empty of blue stuff. In fact, it was entirely empty except for some scorch marks and a cloud of slightly blue vapor that hung around it in a pall.

	The Nari were hauled away on floaters, except for the boots, which were ceremoniously dropped into a clear bag by the small Tooleck wearing red and gold.

	The box was hauled away. A blower appeared and sucked up the cloud that was still hanging around despite the vacuum. Then a warpcore marked in blue and gold was rolled into the bay and under the ship. After a bit of clanging from the underside of the ship, the whole group dispersed. The short Tooleck in red and gold appeared to be skipping as he left, dangling the bag with the boots in one hand.

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the captain said, "please resume your seats and we'll continue our interrupted travels."

	As the ship lifted off, Josh looked away from the window, frowning.

	"What's a kunerac?" he asked the Sjoglun.

	The Sjoglun had stopped looking out the window some time before and now was sitting rigidly upright, quivering, all his eyestalks stiff and extended.

	"Hey, you okay?" Josh asked.

	"Fine," the Sjoglun whistled plaintively.

	"What's a kunerac?" Josh asked, again.

	"What? Oh." The Sjoglun paused and then for the next ten minutes tried to explain Sjoglun waste removal processes, in passing giving Josh the answer to what "Purple Spotted Fever" was.

	"Gosh," Josh said, his eyes wide. "No offense but I thought you smelled kind of funny. I'm glad we just have to use the flusher ..."

Chapter Five
Take the Last Mango

	"Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and ?T*Reen," the captain announced as they were about halfway to Nari. "It will be necessary to make short fuel stop in Terub. We'll only be there for an hour or so. Please prepare for exit from hyperspace."

	Josh cocked his ears at the buzz of conversation in the compartment and looked at his Sjoglun companion.

	"Terub?" Josh said. "What's so special about Terub?"

	"Ah, larva, it's a sad story," the Sjoglun said, sighing out of his spicules. "Terub was once called the Sparata of the East. A beautiful city, I have been there many times. But the local Alyt have been engaged in a civil war for the last two cycles of their sun and it has done much damage to the city, to the planet. I doubt that many more ships will dock there for fuel; I could wish we were not doing so."

	"Are we going to be spacejacked?" Josh said. Secret agent Josh Parker ...

	"One would hope not." The Sjoglun sighed. "Nor that we take fire on landing or take-off. But all are possible. We shall have to see what we see ..."

	Josh was looking out the window curiously as the ship banked to approach the planet. It looked much like most planets he'd seen so far, clouds, land, oceans. But then he saw some bright pinpricks on the surface, lights like he'd never seen.

	"What are those?" Josh asked, pointing.

	"Kinetic energy weapons," the Sjoglun said unhappily. "Perhaps negamatter bombs. A great battle is raging there."

	"Is it near Terub?" Josh asked, his eyes widening.

	"Yes."

	The ship entered the atmosphere faster than for the landing in Tooleck, and the atmosphere burned at the edge of the flight-shield. Josh knew that as soon as they were down the captain would have to disengage the shield. And while the shield might stop chemical explosives from bombardment rockets, there was no way it was going to protect the ship from a negamatter bomb.

	The ship banked sharply and landed at the port, taxiing fast towards the terminal. Josh got a fleeting impression of a city of low buildings in the distance. To the east there were low mountains or high hills and as he watched, one hillside erupted in white fire.

	"What's that?" he asked.

	"Bombardment rockets." The Sjoglun sighed again.

	More explosions suddenly erupted on the edge of the spaceport and Josh watched in a mixture of terror and wonder as a flight of air-ships flashed across the port and laid down a string of bombs. One of them began to spin as it passed out of sight and then dropped towards the ground. There was an actinic white explosion from where it went down.

	"Cool," Josh said, momentarily jolted out of terror and into pure wonder.

	"The Nastari have the spaceport at the moment," the Sjoglun said. "At least at last report. They are supporters of the legal government. But the rebels have, apparently, gotten close enough to be dropping mortars on the edge. No, I don't think many more ships will be arriving at Terub ..."

	There was a crowd of people at the gate, waving at the plane, as Tooleck and something that looked like short Nari rolled up in a refueling bot. The bot extended a probe under the wing as the group on it deployed around the ship. The Tooleck, who had the blue and gold markings of a member of Tooleck Spacelines, appeared to be in charge of the guards. One set of guards held back the crowd while the rest appeared to be watching for more serious threats, fingering their plasma guns unhappily.

	The refueling was over in what, to Josh, seemed to be record time and the craft reengaged its engines, lifting off the ground and taxiing to the take-off pads. Another set of explosions rocked the edges of the pad to loud shouts from the passengers and then the ship took off into the skies. Josh noticed that it seemed to be maneuvering more than usual, staying low initially until it was over water and then banking sharply upwards and swinging from side to side. He didn't have to ask the Sjoglun what was happening; he'd read enough about evasive maneuvers.

	A bolt of plasma went past the window, but that was all that appeared to happen. Before he knew it they were looking at the stars again, undimmed by atmosphere.

	"No," the Sjoglun said, "I don't think that I'll be selling many kunerac in Terub for a while ..."

Chapter Six
It's All In The Translation

	If Nari was supposed to be a hot, dry world, why was it snowing?

	Josh contemplated that as he looked out the window at the city of Heteran. The purple sun of Nari was nearing its zenith somewhere above the clouds, but it wasn't visible. There was plenty of light to see by, however, if anyone wanted to. Most of the city consisted of low, circular buildings that looked like dirt igloos. He hadn't been in one yet but his mom had told him that most of the Nari lived underground. He could see why with the wind outside clocking along at something like ninety kilometers per hour and blowing a mixture of snow and dust that left the snow yellow brown where it piled in shallow drifts.

	There were some taller buildings, if no megascrapers, and plenty of ground cars with a few aircars zipping around wildly. Some Nari hurried along the streets as well, gripping ropes that were stung from heavy metal lampposts. The street he was looking at was four lanes wide, flanked on either side by wide gutters down which water flowed. Well, ice at the moment. Dirty ice at that, with bits of rind from some fruit, bones and other debris sticking up from it.

	The biggest single impression was one of untidy mess. The small yards around the buildings were mostly dirt with some scrubby lichenlike substance growing in places and they were all littered with trash. Trash joined the snow and dust in the wind, blowing down the streets, piling up in the drifts and being lifted up in the occasional dust devil that flickered through the air.

	It was an altogether unprepossessing sight. And he was going to be living here for at least two more years.

	Dad was gone already. The project he was working on was near the Basadab Spaceport, which was on the other side of the planet. Since there weren't very many facilities for human dependents in Basadab, Dad was going to be working there for three weeks out of the month and then would shuttle back to Heteran for a week. Leaving Josh and his mom alone for the rest of the time.

	"Josh, I'm going out to look at a house," Jala said, standing by the room iris. "Order lunch while I'm gone but don't leave the room, okay?"

	"Okay," Josh said. He didn't think he was going to be running outside to play any time soon.

	He read and memed for a while, checking out the very limited local infonet. Mom had put the usual filter on it and there wasn't much that was interesting. Finally, getting hungry, he tried to access a room service menu, a skill he'd developed to a high art, but couldn't find one.

	Prowling around the room he discovered a menu in one of the drawers. It was printed on plascrip and didn't have any link codes at all. He was, apparently, supposed to use the device by the bed called a phone. It didn't even have a vidlink. Odd.

	He perused the menu unhappily. There were little flat-pics by each dish with a Galacta name. There was far more writing in Nari, blocks and dots that he couldn't read and which the plant wasn't programmed to translate.

	There was a drink he recognized called shaloop. He'd had it a couple of times before and it was okay. After looking at the food on the menu he settled on something that looked like a strip of meat and a side of some yellowish-white things that looked like rice grains. He really hoped they weren't maggots or something. With the still-pic there was no way to tell. The Galacta next to it just said: "Chelo." There were at least a couple of sentences of Nari in addition, presumably explaining what it was to people that would already know.

	He walked to the phone with the menu in his hand and considered it carefully. There was a note on it in Galacta.

Eating in the room to dial 315
Physical Service to dial 316
Bed Service to dial 317
Calling Out to dial 1
Calling in to dial 2
Every Other Thing to dial 0

	There was a handset with the phone and large speaker. The handset was too big for his hand and the button that had to be pushed was on the wrong side for him. Finally he got the pieces arranged and dialed 315.

	"Hello?" he said.

	"S'GLOR RESH POOT!" a voice screamed back at him.

	"HELLO!" Josh shouted in the phone. "IS THERE ANYONE WHO SPEAKS GALACTA?"

	"S'BLOG NEBBUT ..." the voice went on for some time as Josh set the speaker down where it wasn't causing his ears to ring.

	"GALACTA!" Josh shouted. "FOOD, I NEED FOOD!"

	"S'GLOR RESH POOT, MORUPT G'G'LOROAT!"

	"CHELO!" Josh shouted. "CHELO, SHALOOP! ROOM 748!"

	"CHELO, SHALOOP, S'BLOG EBDET B'B'MOROOP!"

	"I guess," Josh said, then thought about his manners. "THANK YOU!"

	But the phone was dead.

	He tapped his fingers together, wondering worriedly about what he was going to get to eat, then prowled around the room some more.

	He'd taken a shower the night before, before his dad left and he could get some explanations of the controls. But there were more things in that room than just human settings. He fiddled with the buttons and taps for a while, carefully. The shower was on a flexible hose that you had to hold up. Right now it was sitting in the bottom of the bathtub, which was huge. Josh pressed the button he'd been shown to get water, then kept going. There was a brown viscous liquid, another yellow viscous one and then one that looked like water but when it hit the material that hadn't drained from the others flashed into steam and gave off a sulphurous smell.

	"Ah," Josh said to himself, nodding sagely. "That'd be for Sjoglun ..."

	His mother came back just as he was finishing the second dish of chelo, the one he'd accidently ordered. The meat was something chopped up and pressed with spices and not bad at all and the yellowish things had turned out to be some sort of grain or at least they looked, and tasted, like. He just wasn't going to ask. It was something to survive on.

	"What's that?" Jala said as she walked in the room.

	"Chelo," Josh replied. "I don't know what it is and I don't want to; it's good."

	"Well, we've found a house," Jala said. "There's a Nari family that lives there but they rent out the lower floor as its own apartment. And they have a sort of small, indoor, pool."

	"Great!" Josh said.

	"And I found a school," Jala continued, smiling at his grimace. "It caters to ... sort of interplanetary middle management and some of the same among the Nari. Mostly Nari but lots of children of diplomats and that sort of thing; you should be able to fit in just fine."

	"I don't speak Nari, Mom," Josh pointed out.

	"All instruction is in Galacta," Jala replied. "And they meme instead of writing; I checked."

	The house was one of dozens of identical domes set along a side street. The door was some sort of heavy wood and there was a pull rope by it. When Jala pulled on the rope a Nari answered the door quickly. Josh wasn't sure if it was a he or a she but it waved its claws for the two humans to enter. Josh watched the claws and thought about the vids he'd shown his class. Suddenly they weren't nearly as funny as they had been.

	"This is Dr. Reenig," his mother said, gesturing to the Nari. "He owns the house."

	"To be pleased to have you in our nest," the Nari said, whistling the words through a breathing slit set over his mandibles. "Come, come."

	Behind the door was a small room with high tunnels sloping off to the left and down. Just beyond the room the tunnels split, one curving sharply inward and sloping down at the same rate and the other continuing in the previous curve but sloping more sharply. Both were closed by irises. The Nari took the left-hand corridor, whistling the iris open, and led them down a tunnel lit dimly by irregular globes that glowed with a faint, greenish light.

	The walls and ceiling of the curved tunnel weren't dirt but something that looked like plastic or maybe wood with faint, irregular ribbing and occasional oval or circular patterns. The floor was set in tile that seemed to be marble or something similar. The walls were a deep purplish-red but the tile was white turned slightly pink and green by reflection. Josh felt like he was walking down a marble-floored intestine.

	The tunnel finally flattened out at a landing with another iris. This gave onto a large room that was more regularly shaped to human eyes. The floor, again, was made of marble tiles, larger ones, each nearly a meter on a side, but the walls were plaster or something similar. The corners of the room were faintly curved instead of being sharply angular but the room was decorated with humans or Oolteck in mind. Instead of the faint glow-bulbs there was sun-paint on the ceiling, currently set to mimic an earthly tone.

	Josh poked around the apartment in curiosity as the doctor showed it to his mother again. There were several rooms: two bedrooms, a sitting room or parlor, a very large entry room that connected to a dining room, a living room, a kitchen with mostly human-style fixtures and a fresher room. The apartment was comfortably furnished in human-style float chairs and couches. But he noticed that all the doors were double doors and very high. And beyond the living room was another room containing what looked to be a very large oval jacuzzi or small pool. It was currently dry but there were controls to fill it.

	"See, Josh," his mother said, pointing to it as he was contemplating the device. "It's not much of a pool but you can splash around in it. The doctor called it a ... conera or something."

	"Kunerac!" Josh said, startled.

	"Yes," Jala replied. "He showed me how to fill it ..." she continued in a distracted tone, frowning at the controls and then pushing a blue button.

	Liquid began to fill the bowl from inlets on the bottom and she knelt to feel the temperature.

	"Mom!" Josh shouted. "Don't do that!"

	"Why not?" Jala said, pausing.

	"Uhmmm ..." Josh said, trying to figure out how to explain gently. "Uhm ... you have any of those rayel things? A small one that's not worth much real money?"

	"I think so," Jala said, standing up and pulling around her pouch. She frowned dubiously at the metal pieces and then handed one to him.

	"Back up," Josh said, fitting action to words, and then flicked the small piece of metal into the "water."

	There was a fizzing and popping sound and when they stepped back to the pool the remnants of the rayel had settled to the bottom where it was quickly being dissolved.

	"Acid?" Jala asked, sniffing. "Sulphuric acid?!"

	"Yeah," Josh replied. "It's a kunerac. They fixed this place so Sjoglun could use it, too." He looked at the plate set in the wall and nodded. "Yep. Blefrib 2000. No expense spared; that's one top-of-the-line kunerac."

	"And what is a kunerac?" Jala asked, horrified.

	Josh took a few minutes to explain.

	After contemplating the explanation for a moment Jala shook her head.

	"I'm glad we just use the flusher ..."

Chapter Seven
Remember, One Seventh Of Your Life Is Mondays

	Josh stood in the cold, waiting for the airbus, rubbing his hands together and wishing he had a hat. He'd been warned that if he wasn't standing out front the airbus wouldn't even drop. So he had to stand out here, freezing and contemplating his first day at the Central Heteran Combined School. His mom had picked it out but he'd never been there. It was somewhere in downtown Heteran and that was about all he knew about it.

	A blue and white bus dropped out of the air just as he was considering dashing back in to warm up and the Nari driving it dropped the force-screen over the door and gobbled something at him. Josh hurried to board and looked around at the students in the bus.

	They were mostly Nari, young ones ranging from dog sized to bigger than he was. There were a couple of Tooleck, a Nalo male that looked like he was older than Josh, a Sjoglun that must have been pretty young because he was not much larger than a human adult and three or four Terrans. One of them, sitting right at the back of the bus, was a really pretty blonde girl about his own age.

	He took the first available seat, sitting next to one of the smaller Nari, and looked out the window as the bus lifted rapidly into the air.

	Josh decided, immediately, that the driver was insane. The airbus, its engine screaming, lifted up to about six hundred meters, stood on its side and banked to the north, then dropped just as fast and grounded in front of another house. A Nari got on, took a seat, and the bus took off again.

	They picked up three more young Nari, Josh straining not to throw up at each climb and drop, then lifted up one more time and, the engines clearly redlined, headed southward.

	There were other vehicles in the air but, apparently, no concept of air-control. The bus dodged and weaved, once narrowly missing an airtruck that was being towed by some large flying creatures as the driver kept up a continuous, loud, stream of what was either a running commentary or, more likely, profanity.

	Josh held on to the seat, there was not so much as a lap belt, and swore that he was going to find another way to get to school. The flight, however, was short and before he knew it they were dropping through a narrow opening in a force-screen.

	The bus dropped to the ground with a crunch and the students began picking themselves up and getting off.

	The school was completely shielded by the force-screen, which Josh found odd, and covered about three hectares. Most of what was visible were the low entry mounds of Nari nests but there were two large above-ground buildings. He had no idea where he should be going.

	"Uhm ..." Josh said, hesitantly, to one of the humans, a teenage male. "I'm in Miss Kakousis' homeroom."

	"That building over there." The boy pointed to one of the mounds that was on the east side of the compound, right on the edge by the force-screen. "Take your first left on the tunnel, should be the third iris on the right iirc."

	"Thanks," Josh said. "I'm ... I'm Josh Parker."

	"Jeno Szuchs," the boy said. "See you this afternoon, Josh. Isn't Homal the driver a bastard? He does it on purpose, you know ..."

	Josh went to the indicated mound. There were a number of sophonts around his age, as far as he could tell, going into the same mound. He took the first left and found the third iris. This building, he noticed, had the weird plastic–wood on floor and ceiling. The iris wasn't a regular iris, either; it looked sort of wet, like it was an organism or something. But it opened as he stepped up to it.

	The room within was crowded with beings. Most of them were Nari sitting on something that looked like a canted saddle or running around whistling and gobbling at each other. There were some Tooleck and two humans, one boy and one girl. The pretty girl from the bus wasn't in the room, which disappointed him.

	The teacher was a human female, a pretty blonde lady. He was surprised by that but pleased; he wasn't sure he was ready for a Nari teacher.

	He walked up to her and raised a hand.

	"I'm Josh Parker," he said.

	"And I'm Miss Alethea Kakousis, Josh," the woman said, smiling. She had long blonde hair that was braided and then wrapped in a bun behind her head and was wearing a flowered dress. "I want you to sit over there behind Doosam," she added, pointing at a Nari. The seat behind him was a rock, but Josh just shrugged that off. There was an empty desk behind the rock but probably one of the humans or Tooleck running around the room used it.

	"Thank you," he said, walking to the rock and sitting down.

	"Excuse me!" the rock said in gutturally accented Galacta. It shifted under Josh's rump and he jumped up quickly.

	"Sorry," Josh said. "She told me to sit behind Doosam," he added, pointing at the Nari.

	"I am Doosam," the rock answered. The top of it formed into a human face that looked something like Josh. "Doosam Padro. You're supposed to sit at the desk, bag-of-water."

	"Sorry," Josh said again, sitting down at the desk. "I'm new here."

	"Yeah, I know," Doosam said. "Terrys always make the same mistake." The face had rotated around to where it was facing Josh and the mouth moved like it was talking but the voice seemed to be coming from somewhere on the side of the rock.

	"What are you?" Josh asked, fascinated.

	"I'm a Tr'k'k'ikil," the rock answered in a series of clicks. "Humans usually just call us Trekkies."

	"Class!" Miss Kakousis said loudly, pinging over the net for order and shutting down several toolies that were being played. "Take your seats, please."

	Josh did a quick ping for the datanet and was surprised and pleased that most of the class seemed to have plants or something similar.

	The school net pinged for the start as a few more young beings scurried into the room and took their seats. Miss Kakousis did a general ping to take roll and then brought up a hologram.

	"We'll continue today with our study of the rise of the early Laek ..."

	Josh was sweating by the end of class. He'd heard of the Laek before he came to Nari. They were an empire that stretched over most of the local galactic region prior to the Yemnor. They would have spread over the region the Yemnor came from if they hadn't had a big war with the early Sjoglun. It had been a sub-light war; this was before the invention of hyperdrive, way back in antiquity. They were early Nari and all the worlds in the area that had similar inhabitants, like the Atyl, had descended from them. But he'd never even heard of the Sdree, non-Narioids and apparently extinct, that had been an important part of the Laek Empire or Sdreas, Segjerx or Suilak, all of them Laek emperors that Miss Kakousis had mentioned in passing as if everyone in the room knew what she was talking about.

	"Your memeports on the Laek Empire's second war with the Sjoglun is due on Julsey," Miss Kakousis ended as the ping for change of class sounded. "I expect not just text but full audio-tridee ..."

	"Come on," Doosam said, rolling towards the exit. "It's Galacta next."

	They didn't even enter the corridor, just went through another of those wet looking irises into the room next to theirs. The teacher there was a Tooleck.

	"Josh," the Tooleck said, skittering through the crowd of young beings. "I'm Mr. Mistoki. Good, you've met Doosam. You'll be sitting right in front of him ..."

	Josh thought that Galacta would be easy but the class was way in advance of anything he'd ever taken on Terra. They were reading something called Sharnash' Adventures on Norham. That was okay; it was about a Tooleck that goes to visit her aunt who lives on some jungle world. But the the spelling they were learning was ... wrong. A bunch of the Galacta words were spelled differently than he was used to. Finally, he pinged the teacher hesitantly.

	"Yes, Josh?" Mr. Mistoki said.

	"Sir," Josh said. "Medakalbol. It's not spelled the way—"

	"Ah, a Terran," Mr. Mistoki said, waving all five eyes. "Well, Mr. Parker, this is how it is supposed to be spelled, the Queen's Galacta, don't you know, not Terran."

	"But Terrans do speak Galacta!" Josh replied. "And write it!"

	"Not properly," Mr. Mistoki said with a sniff. "I am aware that you've been improperly taught up until now, young Terran, but try to keep up ..."

	"So when I'm doing this memeport for Miss Kakousis, do I spell in Terran or Tooleck?" Josh said, throwing up his arms in exasperation.

	"Either," Doosam said. "Both. Miss Kakousis and Mr. Mistoki have been arguing about it as long as I've been in school here. But Miss Kakousis won't take points off for either spelling."

	They were headed to recess, following a crowded tunnel downward, with Doosam trying not to run over people's feet, talons and tentacles.

	"I was expecting Nari teachers," Josh said. "Not Tooleck, Terrans, Nalo ... "

	"Wait until you get to Miss Hissberger," Doosam said balefully. "She's a Jootan and limestone is she mean! We've got her for math and she's just brutal. Thinks everyone in the Galaxy is lower than the Jootan. Real Zimbot."

	"Wow!" Josh said. "I didn't think there were any more Zimbot!"

	"Oh, I don't mean she's a really real Zimbot," Doosam replied. "I mean, she's not going to drag the Adoo students off to the mines or sprinkle them with salt. But ... well ... you'll learn."

	The tunnel leveled out and through a big open iris Josh could see a large room. It was filled with kids and had some sort of big fungi lining one side.

	"Is this the lunchroom?" he asked, worried.

	"No, of course not!" Doosam said. "This is the gym!"

	Kids were running around in circles or talking or sitting on some of the fungus. At one end a game of dyup ball was just starting with the two sides picking players.

	"Let's go play dyup!" Doosam said, rolling quickly across the gym floor. "If we hurry we can get there before they're done picking."

	"Don't they play null-grav around here?" Josh asked, frowning. He'd played dyup before but Terra tended to have more null-grav teams while it seemed like the rest of the galaxy played dyup.

	"There's a lot of Terrys in Heteran and some of the other schools play null-grav, but we play dyup at Central," Doosam said as they reached the group

	"Hi Doosam," a Tooleck said as the rock rolled to a stop. "I take Doosam!"

	"I'll take Denpas," the other team captain, a Nari, said.

	Josh tried to look alert, happy and the best dyup player ever to be born or whelped or whatever. No luck. All the other kids gathered around, and even one female human, got picked until it was down to just him, standing all alone.

	"You've got seven, I've got eight," the Tooleck said. "I'll get rid of Fidbut."

	But Doosam had been talking to the Nari and the local lifted his banana shaped black head and shot out a labial extension.

	"I'll take the Terry," he spat, then lifted the oblong dyup flyer and lofted it into the air. "Go!"

	Dyup is a simple game with simple rules. The dyup ball is caught by a player and then thrown to another player on his, her, its or V!Tup team, who then passes the ball to the next player on the team and so on and so forth until it gets to the end of the field and tossed through a small gate called a shuttle. Players who have the ball cannot run with the ball or be touched except under certain circumstances. Attempts to pass the ball can, of course, be intercepted by the other team.

	There are a few complexities.

	The first of these is that the dyup ball has an anti-gravity lift and drive device that is misweighted so that it constantly spins within the ball and sends it in random directions. Thus if tossed upward it may come directly down upon the head of the tosser. If thrown to another player it may curve in any direction. It never goes more than seven meters above the playing field but other than that it will go in any direction randomly. If a player touches it and cannot catch it and it thereafter strikes the ground out of bounds it passes to the other team, assuming anyone can get a hand on it at all.

	Humans are limited to catching the ball only with their right arm. If they touch it with their left arm or hand the ball turns over to the other side. They can clutch it to their body but it cannot touch the head or the right leg. It can be bounced with the left leg but only if the player is not standing in one of the seven rings. There are similar rules for other species.

	This then brings us to the question of the seven rings.

	There are seven rings in the dyup field, Udhas, Snup, Thawasaf, Bebas, Nihad, Idaya and George. They are placed equidistantly down the field in two sets of three with the Udhas being in the center.

	A player who catches the dyup ball while standing in the Udhas ring is immune to being tackled but only if they caught it while standing in the Udhas ring. Furthermore they can only throw the ball Jnorbong, or in the opposite direction from their own goal in a 45 degree area towards the edge of the field in the direction of the Bebas or George ring towards one of their own team's players and players from other teams are not permitted to move to intercept the throw unless the ball touches the ground.

	A player who catches the ball in the Snup ring or catches it and can make it to the Snup ring in one bound is then permitted to pass the ball, unhindered, to one other player who then gets three bounds before the game begins again. The first player cannot, however, move out of the Snup ring, and the player who now has the ball gets only three more bounds before having to stop and is liable to be tackled by players from the opposite side during those three bounds. Bounds are limited to a distance of slightly less than two meters and are called "Rhmer." All Rhmer must be Jnorbong.

	Players who catch the ball in the Thawasaf ring or catch it and can make it to the Thwasaf ring in one Rhmer are then permitted to run to their goal but they must first round either the Bebas or Nihad ring, depending upon which is in the opposite direction of their goal and if they were outside the Thawasaf ring they have to make it into the ring in that one bound before running to the other rings. However, they are then liable to be tackled during the run. They are not permitted to pass unless they are in contact with a player from the opposite team.

	A player who catches the ball in the Bebas ring or catches it and can make it to the Bebas ring in one Rhmer is permitted to throw the ball to a player from the opposite team who then changes sides and is permitted three bounds (or seconds) while play stops, after which the play resumes and the player is liable to be tackled.

	A player who catches the ball in the Nihad ring or catches it and can make it to the Nihad ring in one Rhmer automatically passes to the opposite team and is liable to be tackled. Players can throw from the Nihad ring but only Jnorbong if their current goal is on the Nihad end of the field. (Called the Radkas.)

	A player who catches the ball in the Idaya ring or catches it and can make it to the Idaya ring in one Rhmer also passes to the other team but cannot be tackled, and can only throw the ball Jnorbong [*This assumes that they can figure out which team is theirs.] 

	A player who has had the ball turned over due to passes from the Thawasaf or Bebas ring can attempt to make it to the Nihad ring or the Idaya ring. If they enter the Nihad or Idaya ring before they are tackled and within their regulation Rhmer they are immune to being tackled and can throw the ball Jnorbong without attempts to intercept however they also automatically switch to the opposite team but only after their throw [*See prior footnote] 

	The rings take up about half the total area of the field.

	Failure to throw Jnorbong, touching the ball with illegal extremities, excess Rhmer or leaving the field with the ball, even if traveling Jnorbong, are grounds to turn over the ball to the other team.

	There is no tripping.

	That, with some minor additional rules that run to some four hundred and twenty-three million words for competition play, is dyup The legal industry occasioned by competition dyup play supports over sixteen million sophonts and generates over sixty billion credits in legal fees per year, so the game cannot be said to be worthless. Without all the lawsuits surrounding it, thousands of young beings would go hungry every night. [*The legal industry occasioned by competition dyup play supports over sixteen million sophonts and generates over sixty billion credits in legal fees per year, so the game cannot be said to be worthless. Without all the lawsuits surrounding it, thousands of young beings would go hungry every night.].

	In this game, when thrown, the ball traveled upwards very quickly and then down even faster, striking a Nari player on the head and mildly concussing him. There was a brief scrum while both of the team captains got into a violent argument about whose ball it was now. As the scrum broke apart a Nari had the ball and took a Rhmer to the Snup ring. Both of the team captains immediately changed their argument to whether it was a valid Rmer or not, the captain from the opposite team insisting that levering oneself up counted as half a Rhmer with the other violently opposing that call. Both eventually started rolling around on the ground, punching at one another, while the game proceeded around them.

	The Nari, who Josh was pretty sure was from the opposite team, tossed the ball towards him. It curved to the right but Josh snagged it with one hand and a legal knee bounce, then realized that in three bounds he was going to be liable to be tackled so he quickly threw the ball to some spiderlike creature who was immediately piled with bodies. This was technically illegal but the spider creature, when he crawled off the field, wasn't in any position to protest.

	During the scrum the ball shot out and upwards, going down the field rapidly with all the young beings that were hale following it in a milling, screaming, crowd. Josh joined in and was quickly tripped by a Nari he was virtually certain was from his own team. The ball was finally tackled by a small Sjorglun while in the Udhas ring. He threw anti-Jnorbong, or so the opposite team's captain contended, at which the two captains got back to their fight.

	The ball, which had been tossed towards a Tooleck, shot up into the air and then bounced off the ground, rolling out of bounds. However, before anyone could catch it, it bounded into the air again and went off across the field. It was finally caught by a very small Nari who was carefully standing outside all the rings.

	"That's supposed to change to Tforlock's team!" Doosam shouted, rolling towards the Nari.

	"I'm on Tforlock's team!" the Nari shouted, struggling to hold the active ball in two of his left pseudoarms.

	"No you're not!" Doosam shouted, rolling over and extending two pseudopods to wrestle the ball away. "You're on Hemshots!"

	"Am not!" the Nari contended, grabbing the ball with all his arms.

	"Foul!" Josh called.

	"Not with Nari," Dossam said.

	The ball scrabbled loose and went into play again. Josh managed to jump off Doosam and land with it in the Thwasaf ring. He was clear, most of the team having darted down the field in pursuit while he was bending over getting some breath and trying not to throw up breakfast. So he took off down the field, headed for the Nihad ring.

	Just as he rounded the Nihad he felt something slam into him and he went to the ground with Doosam on his back.

	"Sorry," Doosam said, scooping up the ball. "I got caught in the Nihad."

	"You're in the Nihad again," Josh said, pointing to the red painted ring.

	"So I am," Doosam said, looking at the wall of bodies headed his way. "Catch!"

	Josh had already thrown the ball when he was covered in players.

	"Hey!" he yelled from the bottom of the pile. "That was a fair catch!"

	"Upfield! Upfield," one of the team captains screamed.

	"I'm going to find the bastard that invented this game and kill him," Josh said, trotting in the direction of the ball. Suddenly it hit the ground, bounded into the air, changed course and headed back down towards where Josh was trotting and Doosam was rolling slowly.

	As it passed overhead, Josh felt pseudopods wrap around his belt and arm.

	"Go get it!" Doosam shouted, suddenly extending up like a megalith and tossing the Terran through the air.

	"You're on the opposite team!" Josh yelled.

	"No I'm not," Doosam said. "You were in Nihad."

	"That's my point!"

	Josh managed to snag the ball with one hand. He pulled it into his chest, then had a brief but unpleasant moment of realization that he was about six meters in the air and descending. Rapidly.

	He hit with a thud, his impact slightly reduced by a sudden upward bound of the ball just before he hit. He lay there for a moment, seeing stars and catching his breath. He just started to get up when he was tackled by a Nari. He was pretty sure it was the one that tripped him at the beginning of the game.

	"Leave me alone!" Josh yelled. "It was a legal catch!"

	"You're in the Nihad Ring!" the Nari shouted, pulling at the ball. "It's legal to tackle!"

	"It wasn't a Rhmer, I was thrown and farther than a legal Rmer," Josh said. "It counts as a free catch."

	"Does not!" the Nari said.

	"Does so!"

	By this time the ball had wriggled loose and back into play and Josh suddenly found himself in a fight with the little Nari. The Nari's labial extension shot out and punched him in the nose as Josh kicked in the vague area of the groin region. There probably wasn't anything there to kick but it was better than just getting repeatedly pummeled by the labia. The second time it shot out Josh got a hand around it and began shaking it back and forth as the two of them rolled around on the ground. The Nari's arms wrapped around him while Josh held him off with one hand, jerked the labia viciously in the other and kept kicking him in the groin.

	"Here, now, what's all this then?" Mr. Mistoki said, pulling the two apart with difficulty.

	"He's a cheater!" the Nari said. "It's no fair!"

	"He tackled me after a legal catch!" Josh protested, sticking out his tongue and then tasting blood. "My nobe ib bleeding!" Hurt, too.

	"Well, recess is about over," Mr. Mistoki said. "Now, you two were just having good fun playing dyup; these things happen. Touch feelers and say you're sorry."

	Josh stuck out his hand angrily as the Nari bowed forward.

	"You need to bring your sensory organs into contact," Mr. Mistoki said. "Touch heads in your case, Terran."

	Josh bowed angrily, and whispered.

	"I'm gonna kick your black butt, bug," he said.

	"I'm going to feed you to a brooder," the Nari whispered back.

	"There, now," Mr. Mistoki said jovially, "we're all friends. Josh, I understand that body fluid loss in endoskeletal creatures is not all that serious but you are ... leaking ... rather ... profusely ..." The Tooleck trailed off and then keeled over backwards, all five eyestalks retracted into his cranial cavity.

	"Can't stand the sight of body fluids," Doosam said, rolling up behind them. "You might want to stay away from Malfoo."

	"Who?"

	"Malfoo, the kid you were fighting. His dad is in the Nari security forces and he can make a lot of trouble for you."

	"Oh," Josh said, looking around for the little Nari, but he had disappeared. "He tripped me."

	"Yeah, well, he's a migbop if you ask me," Dossam admitted. "But you still need to watch your back around him. Let's off. Art next!"

	"Who won?" Josh asked.

	"Zero, zero," Doosam muttered unhappily.

	"Oh, just like normal. Remember last year when the Galactic Cup was awarded based on which team could do the better macarena?"

	"Feel the creative energies of the universe!" the teacher squeaked, waving two forelegs in the air ecstatically. "Let them flow, flow through you up the brush and into the canvas! Let them infuse your pigment with their spectacular scintillating rhythms!"

	The teacher was a Grantin, a being that looked something like a large, green, daddy longlegs. Very large. Her body was suspended about two meters above the ground. She was carefully stepping among the students, dropping down from time to time to make a suggestion here, add a dab of paint there. Her lower legs were covered in paint and it was splashed on the underside of her abdomen as well. She looked a bit like a cross between Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock with a dash of Lovecraft.

	Josh was doing his best to paint a space-fighter like they used in the Orion War. But he could never get the reaction control veins to look right and the fuselage was really just a blue and yellow blob. It was supposed to be one of the Toffire fighters that had saved Tooleck during the System battle. But ... he could never get it to look right.

	He didn't like daddy longlegs, or Grantin for that matter, but if he was ever going to get it right he was going to have to ask the teacher for help. However, she'd never been by him and he'd tried pinging her a couple of times with no answer.

	"Miss Tchick?" Josh said, raising his hand.

	"Y ... yes?" the teacher said, skittering around on all ten legs and pointing a few eyes in his direction.

	"Could you give me a ha ... a fee ... could I get some help?" Josh asked.

	The teacher looked at him for a moment and then raised herself up with a deeply indrawn breath.

	"Very well," she said, skittering over to his easel, her body clearing those of the young beings in-between, the legs carefully placing themselves in open spots.

	"I'm trying to do a space fighter—"

	"Oh, why must you male mammaloforms always create weapons of war?" the teacher snapped, carefully lowering her body and swiveling six eyes at it. "Your problems is perspective, young Terran ..."

	"What's perspective?" Josh asked, swiveling around on his stool, brush raised.

	The teacher let out a high-pitched shriek and backed away, rapidly.

	"Pardon me, Josh," the teacher panted. "Must go ..." With that she skittered out the door as fast as her legs could carry her.

	"Terrified of mammaloforms," Doosam said from near the floor. He had a piece of plascrip held down with four pseudoarms and appeared to be painting ... a rock ... with two more. He'd used a lot of gray. "Just can't stand them. Rocks are okay, anything with an exoskeleton, sure, but get her around an endoskeletal and she just goes to pieces."

	"You're telling me she has an irrational fear of mammals?" Josh asked.

	"Yep. Not enough legs. Too few eyes. Body all the wrong shape. Just ... gives her the willies. Grantin are like that. She'll be back. But, face it, you're on your own in this class. Not that she grades hard. Just put some color on the paper and when you turn it in, do it at arm's length. But this is as good as it gets. Next period is ... math."

	"You vill take your SEATSSS!"

	The Jootan teacher, Miss Hissberger, had apparently teleported to the space behind her desk. One minute the room was empty of teacher, with various young beings running around doing their individual versions of shouting, the next there was this ... Jootan standing at the end of the room, waving a meter stick in her hand.

	"You vill sit down unt you vill be QVIET!" she shouted, slamming the meter stick on the desktop.

	She was short for a Jootan, barely a meter and a half, dressed in a black jacket, white shirt and black pants with her brown tail sticking out behind, lashing back and forth angrily. She had beady black eyes that swept the room like a laser as the last of the students settled into quiet, quivering, panic.

	"YOU!" she shouted, pointing the meter stick at Josh. "Josh Parker. New to my classss, arrre you?" she purred.

	"Yes?" Josh said. It seemed painfully obvious to him as the rest of the students tittered and whistled in humor.

	"Vat-ist-der-qvadrratic-eqvation?" she shot out in a staccato.

	"I ..." Josh gulped and shrugged. "I don't know?"

	"Vat are they TEACHING on Terra theessse days?" the teacher spat. "Int te old daysss vast taught quadratics on Terra in der second grate! Vere is vaunted Terra now, I ask you, ey? How vill you maintain your soooo superior FLEET? Unlessss you buy it all from der Jootan! Vell, today, you vill be LEARNING der qvadratic eqvation! Unt ... here it iss!" she ended sharply, spinning around to the board.

	"How was school, dear?" Josh's mom called from the living room as the iris closed behind him.

	Josh fell to his knees and leaned against the iris, panting and trying not to throw up.

	"Fine?" he said, crawling across the entry room towards the fresher.

	"Good," his mom replied. "Dinner in an hour or so and you need to get ready for tomorrow. Do your homework."

	"Yes, Mother," Josh called weakly, tapping at the door to the fresher instead of whistling and then pulling himself up on the sink. His nose was still a bit bloody, his clothes were ripped and he was nauseated from the flight home. One of the Nari had thrown up during one of the dips and he'd never ever forget the sight of the vomit in midair, everyone eyeing it and wondering where it would come down. As it turned out, it hit the driver in the back of the head, which served him right. Homework? He could barely remember his own name.

	And it was only Monday

Chapter Eight
Love, Or At Least Chelo, Conquers All

	One of the many oddities of the Heteran Central School was that there was no lunchroom. Instead, at spaced times, the children were permitted to go to the surface and buy food from vendors in kiosks.

	Josh had just bought a chelo plate and was heading to an out-of-the-way spot to meet Doosam when he saw the pretty blonde girl from the bus sitting on a wall that circled one of the mounds. She was contemplating the inside of her lunch bag and frowning.

	"Hi," Josh said nervously, holding the chelo in one hand and a choco-cola in the other. "Posh, Jime Arker ..." He paused and cleared his throat. "I mean, Mime Posh Jarker ..."

	"You're Josh Parker," the girl said, smiling shyly.

	"Yeah," Josh said. "That. Uhm ... don't like your lunch?" he asked. "I've got chelo. We could trade. And a choco-cola ..."

	"Thanks," the girl said. "I accept. Want a seat?" She pointed at the one next to her.

	"Sure!" Josh handed her the plate and bulb.

	"I hate doing this to you," the girl said, setting the items down and handing over her lunch bag with a sigh of gratitude. "My mom thinks I like dorank sandwiches."

	Josh contemplated the sandwich, which was spread with something purple, and then slipped it back in the bag as his stomach rumbled.

	"I'm not all that hungry," he said, lightly. "So ... what's your name?"

	"Charli," the girl said, taking small bites of the chelo slice and following them with a bite of the steamed grains. "Charli Wright."

	"That's a nice name," Josh said. "Uhm ... I saw you on the bus ..."

	"Yes."

	"And I noticed that you don't get dropped off at your house ..."

	"There are three kids that live on my street," Charli said softly. She had perfect, white teeth, Josh noticed as she nipped at the chelo. "The other two live on the east block but we all get dropped off on the corner. I only live a few houses up."

	"I was ... hmm ... " Josh said, his voice suddenly cracking. "I was wondering if maybe you'd like somebody to walk you home?"

	"Then you'd have to walk ... well blocks home," the girl said, looking up at him shyly. And bright blue eyes. She had the brightest blue eyes Josh had ever seen in his life.

	"That's ... that's ... that's ..." Josh cleared his throat again and broke away from the hypnotic eye contact. "That's okay. I'll be fine."

	"It's really cold out," Charli said dubiously. "I mean, it's just cold under the force-screen but it's really cold out there. The wind and all ..."

	"Not a problem," Josh said blithely. "By the way, why a force-screen?"

	"Kidnapping," the girl replied in a scared little tone. "Some of the kids that go here, their parents are pretty rich. Or they're in the government and there are terrorists. So ... force-screen. And armed guards."

	"I've never noticed them," Josh said, his eyes goggling. "Are your parents ... ?"

	"No, silly," Charli said, smiling. And dimples. Just the cutest little dimples. "My mom's a systems engineer for Sclock-Buren. We're okay but we're not rich."

	Just then there was a ping for the end of lunch and Josh stood up, holding out his hand.

	"Thank you," Charli said, taking it as she stood up.

	"You're welc ..." Josh cleared his throat again. "You're welcome ..."

	The evil Nari terrorists had captured the painfully beautiful Charli ... Charli Wright and were holding her to force secrets from her mother, the vital systems engineer for ... some company.

	But Josh Parker had figured out a way in through the air-ducts. Using his small size he was squeezing through the ducts and had just about gotten to the point where he could line up the evil Nari and blow them all away with his forty-watt plasma rifle, rescuing the bound and helpless Charli, when ...

	"Mister Parker!" Miss Hissberger snapped, slamming her meter stick on the desk with a sound like a plasma shot. "Vat are te factorsss of thisss eqvation?"

	"I have no idea?" Josh said, trying not to cry. He used to like math.

	Josh was sitting at the back of the bus when Charli boarded. He had run there from class and had already driven off one Nari with bared teeth.

	"I saved you a seat," he said, waving at the center seat at the back as the bus took off.

	"Okay," Charli said shyly. "But I usually sit where you're sitting. Would you mind?"

	"No, not at all," Josh said, sliding over. As she slid past him her leg brushed his and he felt like the contact was liquid fire.

	"Why do you sit there?" he asked curiously as the bus cleared the force-screen.

	"Because this seat has a grab bar," Charli said quietly, reaching between her legs with both hands and wrapping them around the tube of metal. "And that one doesn't."

	Josh felt himself lifting into the air and for a moment he hung there, perfectly balanced in zero gravity. That couldn't last, and it didn't, as the driver climbed upwards and Mr. Newton took over, slamming Josh into the floor of the bus at slightly more than one earth gravity.

	He had the wind knocked out of him but his flailing arm wrapped around one of the legs for the seats and clung like a limpet, pulling him in to where he could wrap both arms around the anchor. Despite that his lower body was being flailed up and down and side to side, but it was better than flying through the air.

	"This ... isn't ... oof ... so ... bad," Josh said, looking up at Charli. Nice legs, too. "Might just be the best seat ... oof! on the bus."

	"No," Charli said, her perfect brow wrinkling in perplexity. "This one is better. I'm not being flopped up and down on the floor."

	"No," Josh admitted. "But ... argh ... I sort of ... ooof ... like it. Not ... ow! ... bad ..."

	When the bus grounded to drop off the first kid, Josh scrambled to his feet and regained his seat.

	"Mind if I share your grab bar?" he asked. There was a curve of metal visible under her right thigh.

	"Sure," Charli said, sliding over slightly.

	He could just get two hands on the grab bar, his left wrist in contact with the outside of her leg. Again, his wrist seemed to be on fire. Which was weird since the bus was pretty cold.

	They finally reached Charli's stop and he gestured courteously for her to lead, then followed her down the aisle.

	"MOGROMP TOM TOW DAY!" the driver said angrily.

	"I have no idea what you are gabbling about," Josh said, darting past an outstretched arm and jumping to the ground.

	The driver gestured at him in a fashion Josh suspected was rude but the bus lifted into the air again. Josh thought about what his mother would say and checked his plant for her location. She was downtown, shopping, so he left a note to trigger when she got back, saying that he'd dropped by a friend's house around the corner and would be home right away.

	The wind was bitterly cold and puddles were frozen on both sides of the street. There wasn't any traffic, though, so they walked down the street side by side.

	"Are your hands cold?" Josh asked. His were freezing.

	"Yes," Charli said holding one out.

	When Josh took it, he knew what "freezing" really meant. Charli's tiny hands were so icy cold he was sure she was on the edge of frostbite.

	"Christ," he said, worried. "Give me the other one."

	"My house is just here," Charli replied, but she held out the other hand.

	Josh wrapped both of them in his and they walked like that to the iris. Charli whistled at it and they both went into the entry foyer.

	"Your hands are so cold," Josh said. "Are you okay?"

	"Yes," Charli replied quietly.

	"I'm worried about them," he said distractedly. "You should wear gloves, Charli." He held one of her hands in both of his, switching back and forth. The entry foyer was bitterly cold as well but at least it was out of the wind.

	"I keep losing them," Charli said, her brow wrinkling again.

	Josh suddenly untabbed his environment suit and thrust her right hand under his left armpit.

	"There," he said. "I heard about this in a survival meme. It's the warmest place—" he suddenly stopped as he realized the motion had brought her exquisite face to within centimeters of his. Her eyes were wide and her lips parted. They stayed locked like that for just a moment and then Charli slid the other hand under his arm, inside his jacket, and pushed her lips up to his.

	His nose was in the way and he twisted his head to one side. Charli twisted the same way and they bumped noses again with a muttered "'scuse me" from Josh. Twisted again, another nose bump. This was harder than it looked. Finally, Josh took her face in both hands, held it straight, turned to the side and kissed her.

	The butterflies went berserk. While he'd been worrying about Charli's hands and where noses went they'd bunked off for a quick smoke but they were back and they'd brought lots of friends. His stomach dropped, his body went hot and then as cold as Charli's hands. The latter seemed to be warming up nicely and her arms were tracing a path of fire around his sides.

	A delicate tongue flickered against his lips and he opened up his lips slightly. Her tongue pressed against his lightly and he suddenly was consumed by a need to explore the inside of her mouth in the most personal fashion possible. He wanted to know the inside of her mouth better than he knew the inside of his own.

	He suddenly realized they were on the ground, grappling like a fight in the school yard, her arms and hands moving, his arms and hands moving, rubbing up and down each other's backs. Their tongues were having a fight, too, and Josh decided that something that he'd heard described one time was anything but gross. It was ... unbelievable. More fun than ... anything.

	He couldn't tell how long the grappling, kissing, exploring, whatever it was, went on. They'd moved out of the entrance corridor and into a small fresher just off of it at one point. And both their coats had disappeared. But Charli suddenly broke away and frowned.

	"My mom will be getting home soon," she warned, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

	He checked his plant and realized that they'd been out of school for an hour. If his mom was home she was going to be going nuts despite the note he'd sent. But there wasn't a message for him and she hadn't tooled him so he was probably okay. He stood up quickly, offering Charli his hand. Hers had gotten very warm. He could understand why; he still felt like he was on fire.

	"Charli ... uh ..." he said.

	"We'll ... see each other again," she said, smiling shyly. "You're ... really nice, Josh."

	"Thanks," Josh said. The coats were in a small closet on the other side of the foyer. He got his and shrugged. "I don't suppose I could ..."

	"Mom won't let me have guests unless she's home," Charli said. "You'd better get out of here before she catches us."

	"Oh!" Josh shrugged on his coat hurriedly. "I'll ... see you tomorrow, Charli."

	"Yeah," she said, tooling the iris and giving him a peck on the cheek. "Tomorrow."

	Josh stepped down to the street whistling. The air was freezing, the clouds were a solid overcast, dust and trash filled the air. What a perfect day.

Chapter Nine
Of Tooleck and Men

	"Josh, we're having company for dinner."

	Josh opened his eyes and frowned. "Who?"

	"Some people I've met through the Heteran Woman's Club and a Tooleck couple. The male is a friend of your father's."

	"Okay," Josh said.

	"Josh," Jala said uncomfortably. "Among certain groups there's a phrase that ... children are seen but not heard. Don't ... pester them, all right?"

	"Of course, Mom," Josh said in exasperation.

	"They'll be arriving at nine. Take a shower before then and change clothes. Good clothes, it's semi-formal."

	"Yes, Mother," Josh sighed.

	"And brush your hair," Jala finished as the iris closed.

	He had two hours. If they weren't even getting here until nine, that meant they wouldn't eat for days. It was just not fair. He closed his eyes and brought the book up again. In an hour he could probably just about finish it ...

	"JOSH!" Jala shouted. "Are you ready yet?"

	Josh checked his plant and blanched, jumping to his feet. It was a quarter till nine. Hopefully the guests would be, as Mom put it, fashionably late.

	He hurried to the fresher and pulled off his clothes, carefully setting the shower to ensure he got water and not one of the fifteen other substances it was capable of spurting. He took a fast shower, threw his robe on and darted to his room just as the iris pinged.

	Two minutes later, in a pair of dress shorts and a polo shirt, he was out in the foyer, greeting the guests.

	The first couple to arrive were the Tooleck. His mom was just taking their inevitable rellas and setting them on the couch.

	"Josh, this is Grobney and Anoj Sveldonas," Jala said.

	"Greetings," Josh said, bowing and offering the top of his head.

	"What a charmin' boyo," Anoj, the female, said, bowing her head and bouncing her eyes on Josh's hair. Anoj had a thick accent, something like Norky but with more clipped vowels.

	"Hello, Josh," Grobney said, holding out his three-fingered right hand. Grobney's accent was pure Fordoss, very high-class Tooleck. "I met your father in Basadab and told him I'd drop by and keep an eye on you and your mother. Since I've got five, seemed easy enough," he finished, giving a whistle of amusement.

	Tooleck didn't normally shake hands, it was a Terran custom, but Josh took it and shook it politely. It felt like holding a bundle of mobile sticks.

	"Would you care for a drink?" Jala asked, leading the way to the bar. There wasn't a bot so Josh stepped up and prepared to mix.

	"The boyo's your bartender!" Anoj said delightedly.

	"He can handle ... simple mixes," Jala replied. "I'll take a Re'as Tsoonor on the rocks, Josh. Anoj? Grobney?"

	"Sounds good," Grobney said. "Got used to Re'as whiskey on Melshop, don't you know? Only thing around. No rocks for me, Josh, I'll take it straight. Just a drop of a thimblefull."

	"Here," Anoj replied. "I'll mix my own. I was a bartender when I met Grobney. I still remember him in his commando patterning. What a delight! Such a gentleman! Not that he was as much of a gentleman once I got off work!"

	Josh mixed the two Re'as whiskeys and then watched in bafflement as Anoj picked up a highball glass and began pouring in a mixture that could be used as rocket fuel.

	"Cheers!" she said when she was finished. The glass was full to the brim with a complex series of layers. She clinked glasses with the other two and then downed the contents of the tall glass in a single gulp. "Ah! That's hit the spot!"

	Grobney had also downed his and held the glass out for a refill.

	"A bit more than a thimbleful if you please, Josh," he said, waving his eyestalks. "It's a figure of speech, not a measurement. More ... more. That's it," he finished, handling the glass that was nearly full to the rim. "To new friends!"

	Anoj had topped her glass back up with AldeBasadab brandy. It was called "brandy" only because "Oh, My God!" was already taken. It wasn't pure alcohol, since then it couldn't have included all the byproducts that made it so ... refreshing.

	Jala led her guests into the livingroom and sat down, holding her still half-full glass in front of her like a talisman.

	"You were down in Basadab when you met Steve, I believe, Grobney?" she asked politely.

	"Oh, yes," Grobney said, whistling a tune. "Grand fellow. Fine engineer. Not my line, you know, foundations and stuff. I'm a geologist by training, though, and a mining engineer by profession. At the moment. Done a bit of this and a bit of that."

	"Mining?" Josh asked curiously. He'd gotten a choco-cola bulb and was sipping on it. "Basadab is on an alluvial plain. There's ... not much mining in the area."

	"Deposits, old salt," Grobney said, bringing all five eyes around to consider Josh carefully. "Washed down from the Zaborg mountains. All sorts of veins and bits around there. Even found a bit of gold, what? Mainly looking for thoramite, of course. Planet's lousy with the stuff."

	"They do most of that mining in the Zaborg, don't they?" Jala asked. "Not my area, of course, but that's what Steve told me."

	"And mucks of it has run off over the aeons," Grobney replied, waggling his fingers. "Gets all over the place. Problem is finding pockets that are worth setting up to mine; that's why I'm having a look all over. Find a good pocket of thoramite and the company's in isardi, aren't they? Could be a pocket right under Steve's project, ey? Wouldn't want that to happen! We'd be all day trying to figure out which was the better portion."

	"Oh, yes," Jala said. "Of course, I suppose they could move the project ..."

	"Not after they'd put all that time and money in," Grobney said. "That's why I had to have a look at the area. I'll be back as they move the dirt, of course, got to keep making sure."

	"Bit like an archaeologist is our Grobney," Anoj said, waggling her eyeballs. "He knows about all these sorts of things. He even worked on the hypermissile project during the war!"

	"Just a bit, deary," Grobney said, patting her carapace. "Non-technical, of course, physics is a bit beyond me. Not worth mentioning. So you were in Papua, were you, Mrs. Parker?"

	"Yes, before we moved back to Bowan ..." Jala said as the door pinged again. "Oh, I'd better get that ..."

	"You're in ... fifth grade, Josh?" Anoj asked.

	"Yes," Josh said, making a face.

	"Don't enjoy it, much, ey?" Grobney said, waving his eye-stalks.

	"Most of it is okay," Josh said. "But some of it I've had before and some of it is a couple of years ahead of what I'd be taking on Terra. And my math teacher ..."

	"Miss Hissberger?" Grobney said. "Bit of a Zimbot, ey? Good for drilling quadratics into young minds, though. Can't just use a plant, gotta understand what you're doing on those, what?"

	"You know her?" Josh gasped.

	"Say rather I know about her," Grobney said, waggling his eyestalks as two humans came into the room.

	"Grobney knows everybody," Anoj said, standing up.

	"Dirdja, as I live and spicule," Grobney said, extending his hand.

	"Grobney, you old crab," the male of the two replied, shaking the Tooleck's hand, "you do get around, don't you? But I don't think you've met my wife?"

	"The most wondrous Siti," Grobney said, taking the slight woman's hand and bowing over it. "Your husband has told me of your many fine attributes ..."

	"I bet he has!" Siti said, laughing. "Randy old goat's probably told you more than you want to know!" Siti was a short blonde woman with a cheerful face and skin that had been darkened by the sun.

	"Anoj," Grobney said, "I don't think you've met Dirdja Muharrem? And his lovely wife, Siti."

	"No," Anoj said, bowing. "Please to meet you."

	Dirdja was as tall as his wife was short, dark complected with black hair going gray. He bowed to Anoj and then took the drink that Jala handed him.

	"A fine company of rascals," Grobney said, raising his drink. "And rascalettes, I'm sure."

	"Dinner should be ready shortly," Jala said, sitting down. "A roast. It said it was beef, but in Nari ..."

	"Shit," Siti snapped, pronouncing it "sheeee-it." "Probably dhan. If it is, we'll be chewing the rest of the night. No offense, Jala, I know you're new here. They passed off dhan to me as a 'beef roast' right after I got here. Beef my ass, you couldn't cut it with a laser torch."

	"There's a thing you can do with dhan," Grobney said, taking a sip of his drink. "You slice it really thin, then you get a dozer bot to run over it several times. Then you burn it. Then you find something edible." He whistled through his spicules as the group chuckled.

	"I have to admit I don't even know what dhan is," Jala said unhappily.

	"Those flying beasts you see towing aircars around," Dirdja said, nodding. "The Nari used them for transport before the Tooleck started bringing in advanced technology."

	"Been outrun by that Ortulians there, old chap." Grobney sighed. "And the Haron. Both of them are shipping more aircars and trucks here than Tooleck ever has. Cheap things, don't run very long, but they sell them and that's the point."

	"It's not the only thing they sell," Dirdja said darkly. "They're selling hyper technology as well."

	"Well, yes," Jala said, frowning. "I mean, the plant that Steve is working on is to build hyper engines."

	"Wouldn't care to ride on top of one myself," Grobney said, rolling his eyes. "Most of the Nari can't find their tails with both hands."

	"I heard a rumor that they were selling more than engine tech," Dirdja said, frowning. "Hypermissiles," he whispered.

	"Dirdj, old boy," Grobney replied, waving a hand, "the Ortulians don't have hypermissiles. After the pasting they got from you chaps at the end of the war, they renounced them, didn't they?"

	"The Haron have them, though," Dirdja insisted. "And who's doing most of the hyper work on that plant? Haron."

	"Dirdj, my friend." Grobney sighed. "You're seeing ghosts. It's a common problem of the Terrans. No, don't stop me," he said, holding up a hand to forestall the response. "Terrans have only been out on the starlanes for a couple of hundred years. We Tooleck were banging around the galaxy when you were still putting that gasoline stuff in your cars and driving them on the ground. Seen it, been there. Owned most of it once upon a time and not that long ago. We've had generations living among these people and we know them in a way you Terrans simply don't. The Haron are a very insular species and they don't just pass around goodies like they're at a noraz party. Certainly not a secret like hypermissiles. Put it out of your mind."

	"And on that note," Jala said. "Let's see if the roast is edible."

	It was dhan.

	Josh lay awake after the guests had gone, looking at the ceiling and wondering about what had been said at the party.

	Hypermissiles were an important secret that very few species had managed to pierce. Towards the end of the Orion War, the Terrans and Tooleck had faced a very unpalatable choice. The Jootan had surrendered but the Ortulians, who were fanatically determined to die to the last squid, still held out. The planet had been cut off and heavily bombed, but penetrating the system defenses would have been immensely costly. So the Terrans brought out a secret weapon they had been working on for most of the war: the hypermissile.

	Unlike most hyperdrives, the hypermissile could penetrate right into the depths of a planet's gravity well. And since it was in hyper, it couldn't be intercepted. Furthermore, it retained relativistic speed right down to impact. The Terrans had only had to fire a half a dozen, gutting a half a dozen Ortulian megalopoli, before the Ortulian emperor forced his military advisors to sign a peace treaty.

	Since then a few other species had managed to figure out how they worked or had stolen the information from the Terrans. The Naro, the Haron, the Vesiot and the Tooleck all had them. There were rumors that the Adoo had them, as well. But that was it. The club was closed. Anyone with hypermissiles had the capability to wipe out an enemy's planet. By the same token, their enemy could wipe them out in return. So ... nobody used them.

	But if the club was opened up, if everyone started having hypermissiles, especially species that ... weren't all that ... controlled ...

	The galaxy could dissolve in war.

	That was a big thought for a little kid, but he kept going.

	If the Nari got hypermissiles, they'd probably give them to the Alyt who would use them on the Adoo. The Adoo would either respond with their own, if they survived the first attack, or the Terrans would, since the Adoo were their allies. That might bring the Vesiot empire into the war, since they supported the Alyt, and the Vesiot had a big fleet that could wipe Terra clean. Of course, the Terrans would wipe the floor with the Vesiot, too, but the damage would be done.

	But it got worse. The Alyt had lots of terror groups. They could use them as terrorist weapons. Nobody knew where a hypermissile came from. They could drop them from outside a system and then disappear without a trace. One hypermissile could take out most of Bowan and really make it hard for the weather computers to keep up.

	Everything from large-scale terrorism to planets wiped clean of life was possible if the Nari had hypermissiles.

	And Mr. Muharrem thought that his dad was working on a hypermissile plant.

	Josh couldn't figure out what to do about that by the time he drifted off to sleep, but the last vision he had was of Charli being ... really happy that he'd saved the galaxy by stopping the Nari hypermissile project. Really happy. And her hands were warm ...

Chapter Ten
Never Wrestle A Trekkie

	Josh was sitting with Charli on a relatively warm sunny day. He'd figured out how to eat with his left hand so that he could keep his right free to make sure hers didn't get cold.

	He'd also discovered how fun it was to feed a girlfriend, but they had to try to keep out of sight because kids could be unmerciful.

	So they were sitting on the lip of one the mounds, facing the force-screen with most of the young beings scattered around behind them, when Doosam rolled around the edge of the mound.

	"This is where you've been hiding," the Tr'k'k'ikil said. "You never sit with me anymore!"

	"I'm sorry, Doos," Josh said, letting go of Charli's hand quickly.

	"Josh has got a girlfriend!" Doosam caroled loudly. "Josh has got a girlfriend!"

	"Doos!" Josh said fiercely. "Cut it out!"

	"Josh and Charli sitting in a nem," Doosam sang. "B-R-E-L-K-G-N ..."

	"Cut it out Doos!" Josh shouted, standing up.

	"What? You don't want the whole world to know?" Doos said, rolling closer. "Are you breeding yet? I hear Terrys can start breeding early—"

	Josh let out a roar and leapt on the rock.

	That was when he learned an important fact: you just don't try to wrestle a Trekkie.

	Doosam was not a rock; he was a complex structure involving silicon and carbon-nanotube modules in a flexible matrix. He could change shape to anything from a plant to a table and even make a fairly good impression of a human. A small one. But gray.

	When Josh landed on him the surface flexed and Doosam let out a howl that sounded like pain. But Josh's right arm disappeared into the matrix almost immediately and he could feel something grinding on it.

	He kept pounding on Doosam with his left fist, getting nothing more than bruises, then pulled back to knee the rock as hard as he could. He got more bruises but Doosam let out a grunt so he did it again. The whole time his right arm felt as if it was being chewed.

	Doosam suddenly rolled over, trapping Josh's legs and starting to chew on his left thigh. Josh let out a yell and, with strength he didn't know he had, pushed the rock off his legs and ripped his arm free. Then he jumped in the air and landed on Doosam with both feet.

	This produced another grunt from the rock but Doosam quickly rolled out from under him, dumping Josh on the ground. Then he just as quickly rolled onto the Terran's face.

	Josh couldn't see or hear anything and he couldn't get enough purchase to roll the rock off. His nose was squashed flat and he couldn't breath.

	"Say icky-icky-wop-ping-too-don-allll," Doosam growled. "Come on, say it ..."

	"Ugga-ugga ..." Josh grunted. "Ugga ... mugafugmug!"

	"What?" Doos said, rolling aside.

	"I said," Josh replied, "I can't remember what you wanted me to say and I can't say it with rock in my mouth. But 'uncle,' okay?" Josh stood up and brushed the dirt off his clothes as well as he could. Charli had disappeared. With her lunch. His was covered in dirt from the scuffle.

	"If you made me lose my girlfriend I am going to figure out a way to turn you into pebbles," Josh growled, dusting some of the dirt off his chelo and biting it. The grit ground in his teeth.

	"Sorry, Josh," Doosam said, sounding honestly contrite. "I just ... I don't have a lot of kids to hang out with, you know?"

	"Yeah," Josh admitted. "But all you had to do was say so! Charli wouldn't mind. As long as you didn't, you know, make fun of us."

	"But you're so funny!" Doosam said. "Going around with a long face, looking for Charli all the time ..."

	"I guess you ... guys don't have that sort of thing?" Josh asked.

	"Oh, well, we do," Doosam admitted. "But ... it's different. You see, someday, I mean in a long time, I'll probably have to find a mate. I don't know what happens that way, exactly. But if I'm right about the hints I sort of ... absorb him and then I make a bunch of copies that are part him and part me ..."

	"Wait," Josh said, carefully. "You said ... him."

	"Well ... yeah," Doosam said.

	"Does that mean ..." Josh said, gulping, "you're a her?"

	"Uh, yes," Doosam replied. "Is that a problem?"

	Josh looked at the gray lump for a moment and then shrugged.

	"No," he admitted, "I guess not. But ... do most people know that?"

	"No," Doosam admitted. "We don't ... we look pretty much the same."

	"Good." Josh sighed. "Don't let on. Getting my butt kicked by a rock is bad enough. Worse, much worse, if everybody knew it was girl ..."

Chapter Eleven
Of Thoramite and Cruisers

	Teams at dyup slowly shook down and Josh started getting picked earlier and earlier, especially if he could be on the same team as Doosam. Their "flying Terry" combination was hard to beat. He didn't always get the ball, but he got it often enough. Of course, quite often it shifted in midair and he found himself accelerated to the ground rather than lifted, but no bones broken. So far.

	Occasionally, still, he walked Charli home. It was six and a half blocks from Charli's house to his and those were some cold blocks to walk. But he always started out ... warm and there were shops along the main boulevard that he could stop in. One was a general grocery selling Tooleck and Naro foods. He read a couple of the Galacta labels on Naro foods and decided that his dad was right; he really hadn't wanted to know. But sometimes, rarely, there was Terran food as well. Always massively overpriced but if a kid had to pay a couple of credits worth or rayel for a candy bar that wasn't made from worms, it was worth it.

	There were other shops. A butcher, all the meat carefully unlabeled and most of it probably dhan, a baker where for a couple of rayel he could buy a loaf of flat Nari bread, hot from the oven. There were three types: nadorg, which was thin as a few sheets of plascrip stacked on top of each other; jumash, which was slightly thicker with small air-pockets inside; and tanari, which was still flat but leavened and was something like a pita. Of them all he prefered the tanari. He often arrived home munching on a flat loaf and, as his mother put it, ruining his supper.

	There was even a store that had new, at least new to him, Galacta books for download. He had to be careful there, he could easily spend all his allowance and more on books. He discovered a wonderful comic adventure series about an ancient Nalo warrior that held out against the Yemnor for many years through the use of a magic potion. It was hilariously funny, especially as his history teacher drummed in some of the details of the rise of the Yemnor empire and he started to get more and more of the jokes.

	There was a jewelry store as well, that sold implant jewelry for the Nari. But it also had other pieces for Terrans and Nalo and Sjoglun. Most of it cost far too much for Josh to afford but one time he picked up a thin silver chain with the birdlike beast of the Nari king carved on a small amulet.

	The day agreed upon by Tooleck, Terrans and Nalo as "Year End" for Nari was approaching with all the celebrations that would be anticipated. There would be more dinner parties and gifts exchanged on Year End day. The necklace was for Charli and he hoped she'd like it.

	There was going to be a party at school as well, a dinner, concert and dance for the children that parents permitted to attend. A "formal" they called it. Some of the kids from his class would be going and he sweated wondering if he dared invite Charli. It wasn't just a question of whether she would say yes but whether their combined parents would let them. Ten and eleven were young for what was, essentially, a date.

	He arrived home to find, unsurprisingly, that "Uncle" Grobney and "Aunt" Anoj were visiting. They hadn't moved in by any stretch of the imagination but they seemed to spend as many evenings at the Parker residence as at their own.

	He took off his coat and hung it up and then wandered in the sitting room where Uncle Grobney was poring over data on a pad with the tridee playing in the background. The show that was on was one of the few that Josh liked, a historical adventure about an ancient Tooleck king. The character was half legendary but the show, unlike most, placed him in the time period from which the legend probably arose. Josh had several books about him and he knew that most of the stories that placed the king in the late medieval period were just ... wrong. This one was placed in the period shortly after the fall of the Yemnor empire and was as close to "correct" for the period as a show could be. It was called "Torath, King of the Tooleck" and he caught every episode he could. This one, though, was repeat and he more or less ignored it.

	"What are you working on?" Josh asked, looking at the pad upside down. It was scrolling text with some Nari figures shown digging in a video box.

	"Thought there'd be some pockets of thoramite in the delta," Grobney said in a satisfied tone. "Found this one not far from your dad's project.

	"I don't get what's the big deal about thoramite." Josh sighed. "If it wasn't for thoramite, Nari wouldn't have anything to export." And he'd be back on Terra. Of course, he'd probably be back in Miss Smith's primary school with no Charli, but, on the other hand, he wouldn't be taking his life in his hands every day on the bus. "Isn't there anything besides thoramite to use to create hyperdrive?"

	"No, unfortunately," Grobney said, leaning back and focusing all five eyes on him. "Have you studied atomic physics in school yet, Josh?"

	"No," Josh replied. "Why?"

	"Because it's the only way to explain thoramite," Grobney replied, waving his eyestalks in what Josh had learned was something like a smile or a chuckle. "You know that atoms are not whole, yes?"

	"No," Josh said. "They're not?"

	"No. An atom is composed of, at minimum, one electron and one proton," Grobney said, pulling out a sheet of plascrip and a stylus, putting a circle in the middle and surrounding it with another. "There are also neutrons, but I'll skip them for now. When you split an atom, you get nuclear fission." He pronounced it new-clear. "And that releases a good bit of energy. Ole E equals MC, ey? Both the Tooleck and the Terrans used that at one time or another in their development. However, it leaves radioactive material behind, and that has its own problems and dangers. If you strip the atom off you have plasma. You've heard of plasma?"

	"Like plasma guns?" Josh asked.

	"There are other uses," Grobney said, whistling a laugh. "But, yes, plasma guns use a substance called deuterium to create a self-sustaining toroid, a circle, that travels out until it strikes a solid substance, such as a Jootan in my personal experience, and detonates. Transfers a good bit of energy to said Jootan, or a door or a wall or one of your mates, and blows just about anything to gratack. But the point is, with plasma, that you have only protons and neutrons, the electron has been stripped off. With me?"

	"Yes," Josh said, partially understanding.

	"In most cases, this doesn't matter. But with thoramite plasma, when there's enough thoramite plasma in a particular area, what is called its 'critical mass,' it degrades, that means breaks down, into a field of zero point particles. But it's those zip particles that cause gravity and inertia and I'm not even going to try to explain them. But with that field, which can be manipulated, you can accelerate much faster than with any other substance in the galaxy. Thoramite is pumped through tubes of a special material that permit the thoramite to react when the tubes get at a precisely aligned distance. This generates the zip field; the zip field is manipulated for acceleration and when the ship reaches the speed of light the zip field opens a stable wormhole to another location. In the process, however, the thoramite is consumed by the reaction. So you have to have thoramite to drive the ships. And that's why thoramite is so important and anyone who has it has an economic edge."

	"When we were flying over we had a problem with the warp core," Josh said. "They pulled it out and I was watching when they took the top off. It glowed blue."

	"That's thoramite," Grobney said, nodding human fashion. "When the degradation occurs it transfers a bit of charge to the thoramite around it and excites the electron shells which then collapse and release that blue glow. Similar effect to, oh, a chemical light or any sort of light source you'd care to name."

	"One spot on it was glowing really bright?" Josh asked.

	"Uncontrolled reaction," Grobney said, whistling. "Vibration can make the tubes get out of line. You know what a millimeter is?"

	"Yes," Josh said, "of course."

	"Know what a nanometer is?" Grobney asked, his eyestalks waving. "It's smaller than a bacteria. That's how much tolerance there is in those tubes; it's measured in nanometers. So what happened?"

	"There was a Nari—it was a Nari Spacelines ship we were taking from Tooleck to here—there was a Nari that wanted to fix it with tape."

	"Space tape," Grobney said, "thousand and one uses. Technically impossible to use it to fix an uncontrolled reaction. Doesn't mean it hasn't been done, I did it once. But not something for the untutored, you know. What happened?"

	"Big argument, Nari won," Josh said, swallowing. "He blew up."

	"One of several possible outcomes," Grobney said, whistling in humor. "I take it the Toolecks didn't want to do it?"

	"Not the way it looked to me," Josh replied. "Why wouldn't the tape work?"

	"Oh, I didn't say it won't work," Grobney replied. "Just not a method for the untutored and definitely not one to be applied in a spaceport to a civilian vessel in its regular commerce. Very much an emergency field repair, don't you know? With the emphasis on emergency as in 'our ship broke down and there's a Jootan squadron closing in on us and we have to get out of here now.' The problem is the rate of reaction, you see? Too much reaction and the thoramite detonates, as you saw. Too little and it won't sustain the hyper tunnel. And if you get a hot spot like that, microbubbles appear in the material and degrade the zip effect. And the material that the released particles pass through have an effect. You have to get the reaction back to the normal mode and the only way to do that is either send the core back to the factory or figure out a way to mitigate the hot spot. Space tape actually increases the reaction rate, not decreases it. Slap it right on the hot spot and, well ... boom."

	"Is that what happened to you?" Josh asked.

	"Close enough," Grobney said, waving his eyestalks. "Not something I can talk about, youngster. Not even in this day and age. Some secrets have to lie fallow for a long time."

	"Like hypermissiles?" Josh asked. "Anoj said you worked on the hypermissile project?"

	"A bit," Grobney admitted. "Early in the war I was an officer on a cruiser. That's where I got this," he added, rolling his carapace around and pointing to his back. "See the black spots?"

	"Yeah," Josh said curiously. "And something that looks like a crack."

	"Crack came later," Grobney admitted. "Cruiser was escorting a merchant convoy and we got jumped by a group of Jootan fast raiders. Came out of hyper right on top of us, must have gotten our course from a stealth ship. Battle alarms had barely sounded when we were hit with their missiles. One of the cores blew up and I caught a bit of shrapnel." He paused and his eyestalks seemed to extend as if looking at something a long way away.

	"Mate of mine, Oyeke, we'd both joined the cruiser at the same time as subalterns. Saw him crawling up a tunnel. Power was out, plasma gushing, place was a madhouse, everybody scrambling to get out before the negamissiles went off. Oyeke was moving from hand-hold to hand-hold, working his way towards the lifeboats. Had both his legs gone right at the center joint. Vac-suit had sealed over them, but he was still blasting fluids into the vacuum. Plasma arc between me and him, nothing I could do. Then he let go of the hand-hold, got caught in the air that was being sucked out and drifted into the plasma ..."

	Grobney paused and then his eyestalks started moving again and three of them rotated to face Josh. "Anyway, I made it to the lifeboats and another cruiser picked us up a few days later."

	"Gosh," Josh said. "Dad was just an engineer working on a camp."

	"Oh, your father did a bit more than that," Grobney said, whistling in humor. "Bit more."

	"What happened after that?" Josh asked. "To you, I mean."

	"Well, punctured carapace takes a bit to heal," Grobney said, leaning back. "Was in the hospital a fair time. I'd taken my fifth year in physics before the war and my records showed that and that I had a ... rather high intelligence score. Came a Terry to visit me, old chap, colonel but old even for that rank. Had some tests he wanted me to take. Well, I've always been good at tests and these were for memory, which I'm particularly good at. Took the tests, heard nothing more of it. Did some work running clerks, sort of thing I could do while the old carapace healed. Got asked to lunch by the same old duffer. Asked me a number of questions. I hadn't grown up on Tooleck, I'm from one of the colony worlds. Grew up with a drive rifle in my hand, you know, running around in the jungle and what-not. Seemed he knew all about that. Seemed he knew just about everything worth knowing about me, you know, the time I failed math in primary for example. Had a teacher a bit like your Miss Hissberger that time so I know how you feel. Finally asked me if I'd consider a posting that meant I'd probably get killed, but rarely get bored." Grobney paused and his spinctures whistled until he choked.

	"Lord, but I was young. Thought I'd live forever whatever this old duffer had to say. Most of the time I was on the cruiser was nothing but boredom. Go across the Rift escorting a convoy of merchants, hoping to avoid the raiders, go back. Over and over. Very boring except when you're getting blown up. So I said yes. Dumbest one thing I'd ever done. He was right. Damned near killed me more than once, but I was rarely bored. Angry, unhappy, wet, cold, miserable, terrified, but rarely bored. If you're ever in the military, lad, there's a saying: Never volunteer for anything. It's important, remember it and heed it."

	"What was it?" Josh asked. "What were you doing?"

	"Well, maybe we'll talk about that another time," Grobney said, keying his pad. "We've both got homework to do, what?"

Chapter Twelve
If You're Not Going to Like the Answer ...

	Josh stumbled off the bus and turned to face the driver.

	The problem was that while the driver didn't speak Galacta, over the years of driving he had learned most of the major curse-words. And you could get in a lot of trouble for cursing at the driver.

	The point was, though, that he could easily catch individual curse words. But, after much thought, Josh had come to the conclusion that if you spoke really fast he wouldn't catch it.

	So he'd practiced. In available free time. He'd written down every curse word he knew, in three languages at this point, left out the Nari, and recited them. To the point that he could get out a string that was about twenty syllables long in under a second and a half. He'd timed it.

	He pulled out a scrap of paper, cleared his throat and spoke.

	"#@$(%)@@!&***()))@@!!#@%&((*&%$$@@(((($#!"

	When he was done he nodded at the driver, who was waggling his feelers in puzzlement, and turned around to go in the tunnel.

	That felt better. It didn't make up for five months' worth of bruises, but it helped.

	He decided to keep the scrap of paper. It might come in handy again.

	As Josh stepped into the surface tunnel his nose was assaulted by a strong stench of sulphur, something like rotten eggs but if so a whole air-truck must have crashed.

	"Did the kunerac overflow?" he muttered, whistling the iris for the Parker apartment and holding his nose.

	As he stepped in his home tunnel the stench got worse and increased as he descended the ramp.

	Coming around the last bend he saw several Nari rubbing their tails on the wall and Dr. Reenig standing by, watching them.

	"Hello, Dr. Reenig," Josh said, releasing his nose and trying not to gag. He realized the smell was coming from the wall which looked ... wet.

	"Hello, Josh," their landord said. If he had any problems with the smell it wasn't evident.

	"Can I ask what's going on?" Josh said.

	"The lining on the tunnel needed touching up," Dr. Reenig replied. "So I called in a crew to work on it."

	As he was saying that, one of the Nari stopped smoothing the wall and leaned back. The esophagal opening under his labial extension opened and he gobbered up a chunk of what looked like purple plaster that hit the wall with a wet "smack." The smell intensified as the Nari flipped a tail up and started smoothing the material into the wall.

	"Oh," Josh said, clapping a hand over his mouth and hurrying to the apartment iris. "Gotta go," he added in a muffled tone.

	"Have a good day, Josh," Dr. Reenig replied, turning back to watch the workmen.

	Josh leaned back from the fresher and spit out the mouthful of water, then spit again.

	"Joosshh?" his mother called from the foyer. "Are you all right?"

	"Fine, mom," Josh replied. "Must have been something I ate." He paused and thought about it for a second. "Mom?"

	"Yes?"

	"Don't go out of the house for a while. Dr. Reenig is having some work done. It's ... not safe."

	"Okay," Jala answered. "You're sure you're okay?"

	"Fine," Josh said. "Just fine. But, I have got to learn to stop asking questions ..." he added in a whisper. Then he pulled out his scrap of paper again.

The End