Zoe's Tale Read online

  “Let me guess,” I said, to Enzo. “There are two very scary-looking aliens standing directly behind me.”

  “How did you know?” Enzo said, after a minute.

  “Because what you’re doing now is the usual response,” I said. I glanced back at Hickory and Dickory. “Give me a minute,” I said to them. They took a step back.

  “You know them?” Enzo said.

  “They’re sort of my bodyguards,” I said.

  “You need bodyguards?” Enzo asked.

  “It’s a little complicated,” I said.

  “Now I know why you and your friend can both work on being the brains of the outfit,” Enzo said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, and turned to Hickory and Dickory. “Guys, this is my new friend Enzo. Say hello.”

  “Hello,” they said, in their deadly monotone.

  “Uh,” Enzo said.

  “They’re perfectly harmless unless they think you’re a threat to me,” I said.

  “What happens then?” Enzo asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” I said. “But I think it would involve you being turned into a large number of very small cubes.”

  Enzo looked at me for a minute. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I’m a little afraid of you right now.”

  I smiled at this. “Don’t be,” I said, and I took his hand, which seemed to surprise him. “I want us to be friends.”

  There was an interesting play across Enzo’s face: pleasure at the fact I’d taken his hand, and apprehension that if he showed too much pleasure at the fact, he’d be summarily cubed. It was very cute. He was very cute.

  As if on cue, Hickory audibly shifted its weight.

  I sighed. “I need to talk to Hickory and Dickory,” I said, to Enzo. “Will you excuse me?”

  “Sure,” Enzo said, and took his hand out of mine.

  “Will I see you later?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” Enzo said, and then got that look that said his brain was telling him he was being too enthusiastic. Shut up, stupid brain. Enthusiasm is a good thing. He backed off and went away. I watched him go a little.

  Then I turned to Hickory and Dickory. “This had better be good,” I said.

  “Who was that?” Hickory asked.

  “That was Enzo,” I said. “Which I already told you. He’s a boy. A cute one, too.”

  “Does he have impure intentions?” Hickory asked.

  “What?” I said, slightly incredulous. “‘Impure intentions’? Are you serious? No. I’ve only known him for about twenty minutes. Even for a teenage boy, that would be a pretty quick ramp-up.”

  “This is not what we have heard,” Hickory said.

  “From whom?” I asked.

  “From Major Perry,” Hickory said. “He said that he was once a teenage boy himself.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Thank you so very much for the mental image of Dad as a teenage sack of hormones. That’s the sort of image that takes therapy to get rid of.”

  “You have asked us to intercede for you with teenage boys before,” Hickory said.

  “That was a special case,” I said. And it had been. Just before we left Huckleberry my parents had gone off on a planetary survey of Roanoke and I was given tacit permission to have a good-bye party for my friends, and Anil Rameesh had taken it upon himself to sneak into my bedroom and get naked, and upon discovery, to inform me that he was giving me his virginity as a good-bye gift. Well, he didn’t put it that way; he was trying to avoid mentioning the whole “virginity” aspect of it at all.

  Regardless, this was a gift I really didn’t want, even though it was already unwrapped. I told Hickory and Dickory to escort him out; Anil responded by screaming, jumping out my window and down off the roof, and then running all the way home naked. Which was a sight. I had his clothes delivered home the next day.

  Poor Anil. He wasn’t a bad person. Just deluded and hopeful.

  “I will let you know if Enzo presents any problems,” I said. “Until then, you leave him alone.”

  “As you wish,” Hickory said. I could tell it was not entirely pleased about this.

  “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked.

  “We have news for you from the Obin government,” Hickory said. “An invitation.”

  “An invitation for what?” I asked.

  “An invitation to visit our homeworld, and to tour our planets and colonies,” Hickory said. “You are now old enough to travel unaccompanied, and while all Obin have known of you since you were young, thanks to our recordings, there is a great desire among all Obin to meet you in person. Our government asks you if you will not accede to this request.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Immediately,” Hickory said.

  I looked at them both. “You’re asking me this now?” I said. “We’re less than two hours from departing to Roanoke.”

  “We have only just now received the invitation,” Hickory said. “As soon as it was sent to us, we came to find you.”

  “It couldn’t wait?” I asked.

  “Our government wished to ask you before your journey to Roanoke began,” Hickory said. “Once you had established yourself on Roanoke, you might be hesitant to leave for such a significant amount of time.”

  “How much time?” I asked.

  “We have sent a proposed itinerary to your PDA,” Hickory said.

  “I’m asking you,” I said.

  “The entire tour would take thirteen of your standard months,” Hickory said. “Although if you were amenable, it could be extended.”

  “So, to recap,” I said. “You want me to decide in the next two hours whether or not to leave my family and friends for at least a year, maybe longer, to tour the Obin worlds by myself.”

  “Yes,” Hickory said. “Although of course Dickory and I would accompany you.”

  “No other humans, though,” I said.

  “We could find some if you wanted,” Hickory said.

  “Would you?” I said. “That would be swell.”

  “Very well,” Hickory said.

  “I’m being sarcastic, Hickory,” I said, irritated. “The answer is no. I mean, really, Hickory. You’re asking me to make a life-changing decision on two hours’ notice. That’s completely ridiculous.”

  “We understand that the timing of this request is not optimal,” Hickory said.

  “I don’t think you do,” I said. “I think you know it’s short notice, but I don’t think you understand that it’s offensive.”

  Hickory shrank back slightly. “We did not mean to offend,” it said.

  I was about to snap something off but I stopped and started counting in my head, because somewhere in there the rational part of my brain was letting me know I was heading into over-reaction territory. Hickory and Dickory’s invitation was last-minute, but biting their heads off for it didn’t make much sense. Something about the request was just rubbing me the wrong way.

  It took me a minute to figure out why. Hickory and Dickory were asking me to leave behind everyone I knew, and everyone I had just met, for a year of being alone. I had already done that, long ago, when the Obin had taken me from Covell, in the time I had to wait before my father could find a way to reclaim me. It was a different time and with different circumstances, but I remember the loneliness and need for human contact. I loved Hickory and Dickory; they were family. But they couldn’t offer me what I needed and could get from human contact.

  And besides, I just said good-bye to a whole village of people I knew, and before that had said good-bye to family and friends, usually forever, a whole lot more than most people my age. Right now I had just found Gretchen, and Enzo was certainly looking interesting. I didn’t want to say good-bye to them even before I properly got to know them.

  I looked at Hickory and Dickory, who despite everything they knew about me couldn’t have understood why what they were asking me would affect me like this. It’s not their fault, said the rational part of m
y brain. And it was right. Which was why it was the rational part of my brain. I didn’t always like that part, but it was usually on point for stuff like this.

  “I’m sorry, Hickory,” I said, finally. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. Please accept my apology.”

  “Of course,” Hickory said. It unshrunk itself.

  “But even if I wanted to go, two hours is not nearly enough time to think this through,” I said. “Have you spoken to John or Jane about this?”

  “We felt it best to come to you,” Hickory said. “Your desire to go would have influenced their decision to let you go.”

  I smiled. “Not as much as I think you think it would,” I said. “You may think I’m old enough to spend a year off touring the Obin worlds, but I guarantee you Dad will have a different opinion about that. It took both Jane and Savitri a couple of days to convince him to let me have that good-bye party while they were away. You think he’d say ‘yes’ to having me go away for a year when there’s a two-hour time limit attached? That’s optimistic.”

  “It is very important to our government,” Dickory said. Which was surprising. Dickory almost never spoke about anything, other than to make one of its monochromatic greetings. The fact Dickory felt compelled to pipe up spoke volumes in itself.

  “I understand that,” I said. “But it’s still too sudden. I can’t make a decision like this now. I just can’t. Please tell your government I’m honored by the invitation, and that I want to make a tour of the Obin worlds one day. I really do. But I can’t do it like this. And I want to go to Roanoke.”

  Hickory and Dickory were silent for a moment. “Perhaps if Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan were to hear our invitation and agree, you might be persuaded,” Hickory said.

  Rankle, rankle. “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “First you say you wanted me to say yes because then they might agree, and now you want to work it the other way? You asked me, Hickory. My answer is no. If you think asking my parents is going to get me to change my mind, then you don’t understand human teenagers, and you certainly don’t understand me. Even if they said yes, which, believe me, they won’t, since the first thing they will do is ask me what I think of the idea. And I’ll tell them what I told you. And that I told you.”

  Another moment of silence. I watched the two of them very closely, looking for the trembles or twitches that sometimes followed when they were emotionally wrung out. The two of them were rock steady. “Very well,” Hickory said. “We will inform our government of your decision.”

  “Tell them that I will consider it some other time. Maybe in a year,” I said. Maybe by that time I could convince Gretchen to go with me. And Enzo. As long as we were daydreaming here.

  “We will tell them,” Hickory said, and then it and Dickory did a little head bow and departed.

  I looked around. Some of the people in the common area were watching Hickory and Dickory leave; the others were looking at me with strange expressions. I guess they’d never seen a girl with her own pet aliens before.

  I sighed. I pulled out my PDA to contact Gretchen but then stopped before I accessed her address. Because as much as I didn’t want to be alone in the larger sense, at that moment, I needed a time out. Something was going on, and I needed to figure what it was. Because whatever it was, it was making me nervous.

  I put the PDA back in my pocket, thought about what Hickory and Dickory just said to me, and worried.

  TEN

  There were two messages on my PDA after dinner that evening. The first was from Gretchen. “That Magdy character tracked me down and asked me out on a date,” it read. “I guess he likes girls who mock the crap out of him. I told him okay. Because he is kind of cute. Don’t wait up.” This made me smile.

  The second was from Enzo, who had somehow managed to get my PDA’s address; I suspect Gretchen might have had something to do with that. It was titled “A Poem to the Girl I Just Met, Specifically a Haiku, the Title of Which Is Now Substantially Longer Than the Poem Itself, Oh, the Irony,” and it read:

  Her name is Zoë

  Smile like a summer breeze

  Please don’t have me cubed.

  I laughed out loud at that one. Babar looked up at me and thumped his tail hopefully; I think he was thinking all this happiness would result in more food for him. I gave him a slice of leftover bacon. So I guess he was right about that. Smart dog, Babar.

  After the Magellan departed from Phoenix Station, the colony leaders found out about the near-rumble in the common area, because I told them about it over dinner. John and Jane sort of looked at each other significantly and then changed the subject to something else. I guessed the problem of integrating ten completely different sets of people with ten completely different cultures had already come up in their discussions, and now they were getting the underage version of it as well.

  I figured that they would find a way to deal with it, but I really wasn’t prepared for their solution.

  “Dodgeball,” I said to Dad, over breakfast. “You’re going to have all us kids play dodgeball.”

  “Not all of you,” Dad said. “Just the ones of you who would otherwise be picking stupid and pointless fights out of boredom.” He was nibbling on some coffee cake; Babar was standing by on crumb patrol. Jane and Savitri were out taking care of business; they were the brains of this particular setup. “You don’t like dodgeball?” he asked.

  “I like it just fine,” I said. “I’m just not sure why you think it’s an answer to this problem.”

  Dad set down his coffee cake, brushed off his hands, and started ticking off points with his fingers. “One, we have the equipment and it fits the space. We can’t very well play football or cricket on the Magellan. Two, it’s a team sport, so we can get big groups of kids involved. Three, it’s not complicated, so we don’t have to spend much time laying out the ground rules to everyone. Four, it’s athletic and will give you guys a way to burn off some of your energy. Five, it’s just violent enough to appeal to those idiot boys you were talking about yesterday, but not so violent that someone’s actually going to get hurt.”

  “Any more points?” I asked.

  “No,” Dad said. “I’ve run out of fingers.” He picked up his coffee cake again.

  “It’s just going to be that the boys are going to make teams with their friends,” I said. “So you’ll still have the problem of kids from one world staying with their own.”

  “I would agree with this, if not for the fact that I’m not a complete idiot,” Dad said, “and neither is Jane. We have a plan for this.”

  The plan: Everyone who signed up to play was assigned to a team, rather than allowed to pick their own team. And I don’t think the teams were entirely randomly assigned; when Gretchen and I looked over the team lists, Gretchen noted that almost none of the teams had more than one player from the same world; even Enzo and Magdy were put on different teams. The only kids who were on the same “team” were the Kyotoans; as Colonial Mennonites they avoided playing in competitive sports, so they asked to be the referees instead.

  Gretchen and I didn’t sign up for any teams; we appointed ourselves league managers and no one called us on it; apparently word of the intense mockery we laid on a wild pack of teenage boys had gotten around and we were feared and awed equally. “That makes me feel pretty,” Gretchen said, once such a thing was told to her by one of her friends from Erie. We were watching the first game of the series, with the Leopards playing against the Mighty Red Balls, presumably named after the game equipment. I don’t think I approved of the team name, myself.

  “Speaking of which, how was your date last night?” I asked.

  “It was a little grabby,” Gretchen said.

  “You want me to have Hickory and Dickory talk to him?” I asked.

  “No, it was manageable,” Gretchen said. “And besides which, your alien friends creep me out. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “They really are nice.”

  “They’re you
r bodyguards,” Gretchen said. “They’re not supposed to be nice. They’re supposed to scare the pee out of people. And they do. I’m just glad they don’t follow you around all the time. No one would ever come talk to us.”

  In fact, I hadn’t seen either Hickory or Dickory since the day before and our conversation about touring the Obin planets. I wondered if I had managed to hurt their feelings. I was going to have to check in on them to see how they were.

  “Hey, your boyfriend just picked off one of the Leopards,” Gretchen said. She pointed at Enzo, who was playing in the game.

  “He’s not my boyfriend, any more than Magdy is yours,” I said.

  “Is he as grabby as Magdy is?” Gretchen asked.

  “What a question,” I said. “How dare you ask. I’m madly offended.”

  “That’s a yes, then,” Gretchen said.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “He’s been perfectly nice. He even sent me a poem.”

  “He did not,” Gretchen said. I showed it to her on my PDA. She handed it back. “You get the poetry writer. I get the grabber. It’s really not fair. You want to trade?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “But he not’s my boyfriend.”

  Gretchen nodded out to Enzo. “Have you asked him about that?”

  I looked over to Enzo, who sure enough was sneaking looks my way while moving around the dodgeball field. He saw I was looking his way, smiled over at me and nodded, and as he was doing that he got nailed righteously hard in the ear by the dodgeball and went down with a thump.

  I burst out laughing.

  “Oh, nice,” Gretchen said. “Laughing at your boyfriend’s pain.”

  “I know! I’m so bad!” I said, and just about toppled over.

  “You don’t deserve him,” Gretchen said, sourly. “You don’t deserve his poem. Give them both to me.”

  “Not a chance,” I said, and then looked up and saw Enzo there in front of me. I reflexively put my hand over my mouth.

  “Too late,” he said. Which of course made me laugh even more.

  “She’s mocking your pain,” Gretchen said, to Enzo. “Mocking it, you hear me.”