Sandy didn’t remember drowsing off and wasn’t aware that he had until he woke with Obie standing over him. “You’re turning into a real Hakh’hli,” Obie told him, approving of the after-meal nap. “What’ve you got there?”
“It’s just a poem I wrote,” Sandy said, covering it up.
“Come on, let me see it. We always show you ours.”
“It isn’t ready,” Sandy protested, getting up just in time to see Polly lumbering toward them irritably.
“Lysander,” she accused, “you didn’t clean up after the meal. Next thing you know we’ll have bugs here, and then we’ll have to get the hawkbees in.”
Sandy was stung by the injustice. “Why are you blaming me? Why am I always the one who has to clean up?”
“Because you’re the one who doesn’t sleep. You know that.”
“Well, today I did sleep. I didn’t have time to clean up.”
“You had time to write a poem,” Obie pointed out treacherously. He turned to Polly. “He won’t show it to me, either. He says it isn’t finished, but it looked finished enough to me.”
“Let’s see the poem,” Polly commanded, pinching her thumbs together in a meaningful way. Resentfully Sandy passed it over as the rest of the cohort, yawning and stretching, straggled toward them.
Oh, my
almost forgotten
terrestrial homeland!
I dream of you each day
and think of you asleep
and wish the experience
of treading upon your
soil would come, O
Earth!
Also
it has the
pretty old
moon
“It’s an attempt to write a Hakh’hli poem in the English language,” the poet explained nervously.
“Hum,” Polly said, not committing herself.
“I think that’s pretty hard to do,” Bottom commented.
“Maybe it’s not worth doing at all,” Helen put in. “It’s not the same thing as a real poem, you know. Those wriggly little characters are just ugly.”
“Besides,” Obie, the astronomer, added, thumping the notepad with his clenched fist, “you’ve got it all wrong. The proportions are inaccurate. The Moon ought to be a lot smaller.”
“I couldn’t fit enough words in that way,” Sandy said defensively.
“Then you just should have made the Earth bigger, of course. And both of them are flattened out more than they ought to be. They look more like the one they call ‘Jupiter.’ ”
Sandy snarled, “It’s a poem. It’s not an astronomy lesson!”
“Yes,” Polly said severely, “but you ought to get it right. Also, how can the Earth be ‘forgotten’? You couldn’t forget it. You weren’t ever there to remember it, were you? We picked your parents up in space.”
“That’s poetic license,” Sandy said stubbornly.
Polly lashed her tongue at him in reproof. “Poets don’t have license to tamper with the facts,” she informed him. “Hakh’hli poets don’t, anyway, and it doesn’t make any difference if Earth poets do, does it? Now, no more of this! I vote we watch some films until MyThara comes back.”
But the films the cohort chose to watch were not a kind that Sandy liked. They were all about wars and terrorism, and all those other nasty things humans were known to have done to each other in the twentieth century. When MyThara returned the cohort was quarreling about them. She paused in the door, frowning, as Bottom told Sandy judgmatically, “I think that your Earth governments are fools.”
Sandy said sullenly, “You don’t understand, is all. They probably had their reasons for what they did.”
“What reasons, Sandy? Killing each other? Destroying farms, when neither side has enough food to live on? Spreading poisons? This is not a government of wise leaders who have been bred and trained for the purpose, like our Hakh’hli Seniors. Have you ever seen such outrageous things here on the ship? The hoo’hik tenders attacking the extravehicular workers, for instance?”
“The hoo’hik tenders would be slaughtered if they did,” Obie put in. “Those extravehiculars are tough.”
“That isn’t the point! The point is that such a thing could not happen here on the ship. Hakh’hli do not behave so wantonly.”
Sandy stuck to his defense. “It’s a lot easier to govern a few thousand people than a couple of billion.”
“Oh? Indeed?” Bottom licked out his tongue sarcastically. “And on our Hakh’hli home worlds, where there are a thousand times a billion, have you ever heard of such warfare?”
“I don’t know anything about what’s going on in the Hakh’hli home worlds,” Sandy said belligerently, “and neither do you. When was the last time this ship had any communication with them?”
But that was going too far. Even his friend Obie twitched resentfully, and MyThara gasped, “Thandy! How can you thpeak tho?”
“But it’s true,” he said, and then clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t mind giving offense to his cohort-mates, but MyThara was someone he loved dearly.
“Dear Lythander,” she said seriously, “you shouldn’t talk lightly of the wortht tragedy in our hithtory. Don’t you remember what you have been taught?”
He gave her a repentant look. “I’m sorry, MyThara.” He knew perfectly well that every Hakh’hli in the ship mourned the long-ago day when the Major Seniors of the time, after bitter soul-searching, had made the decision for the ship to go on with its mission even after it had lost contact with the Hakh’hli home worlds.
Obie put in loyally, “He’s just nervous because it’s getting close to the time for visiting Earth. He even wrote a poem about it.”
“Oh? Show me the poem,” MyThara requested. When she had read it she flung her stubby arms around Sandy and gave him an affectionate lick. “It ith a beautiful poem, Lythander. May I have a copy? Oh, thank you! I will keep it in my own netht ath long ath I live. But now, pleathe, it ith work time. We will thtart with buddy thythtem, ath uthual. Lythander, you go firtht with Polly and talk railgun.”
The seven in Sandy’s cohort had a whole planet to learn—Earth language, Earth customs, Earth ecology. Plus all the things every young Hakh’hli had to learn as part of his normal socialization. Plus, for each of them, the harder lessons of his own specialty. Demmy’s was agronomy. Bottom’s was aerosol and food chemistry. Polly’s was piloting and magnetic engineering. Tanya’s was genetic manipulation. Obie’s was astronomy and stellar navigation. Helen’s was chelation, vitrification, and crystal-bonding—in other words, the processes involved in containing toxic and radioactive materials. What Sandy had to learn was easier, but larger. He had to understand something of all the other’s skills, as they all did, for there was always the chance that somehow in the actual Earth mission one of them would be lost. But Sandy had to learn a little more than the rest, because he would be the one to make first contact with the Earth people, and he had to know what to say.
Polly was not Sandy’s favorite to learn from, since she got rough when he was slow to grasp his lessons. As soon as they were alone in her own carrel she commanded, weeping with anticipation of his getting it wrong, “Explain the purpose of the railgun.”
“All right,” he said in resignation, “but no pinching, okay?”
“Maybe not. Get on with it!”