Colony 1: Coast 4, by DarkBeta
(Mountainside, Night of the First Day)
["Jilcu, your father and your father's brother gave me space on the family platform. As I was their brother, I am your father while they are not here. I will not abandon you. But you must release me a brief time!"]
Blair used the Kambai word "stu'utsul". It meant, "the period for reheating porridge". Which took five or six minutes, according to Eli's pocket watch, so Blair figured out that "stahul" (the period for stewing iitsu pulp) was about half an hour. His journal article on gender differentiated vocabularies for time was footnoted in two other publications. And the word for boiling was the same as the word for blossoming. Funny how much Kambai he still remembered.
["Do not depart from me, Short-hair. You will fall. You will vanish with no footprints. The bone ghosts will come with thunder again. The father-trees will burn and the platforms fall. The hunters will fall, burning. The weavers will fall, burning."]
She did not cry or raise her voice. She only listed the elements of disaster, with her white-knuckled hands locked on Blair's flannel shirt.
"She sure latched onto you, Chief."
"I really, really need to get her to let go!"
Jilcu had been, what, six years old when he visited the Kambai? Seven? Her father Akkupei had been the younger brother of the shaman, recuperating on the family platform from being gored by a wild pig. An unskilled stranger's wild questions offered some respite from boredom. Jilcu had sat behind them, and spent hours trying to wind Blair's short uncooperative hair into some semblence of a hunter's knot.
She couldn't be more than fourteen now. He needed to find out what had happened. First he needed to visit the hastily dug latrine though, and she offered a certain impediment.
["Since I left the father-trees, Jilcu, I have found my hunt-brother. You know the strength of the bond between hunt-brothers."]
Jilcu pursed her lips in agreement.
["So I will say to my hunt-brother, that for a short time he must guard my daughter. Do you think I chose a hunt-brother who will fail me?"]
Jim had given his shirt to one of the other children. Crouched at the upper edge of their narrow camp, far from the fire, he didn't look much like a policeman. He did, however, make a very impressive tribal guardian of the sort Burton investigated. Jilcu eyed him warily. Finally she ducked her head, acceding to Blair's judgement.
"Right. Jim, you're babysitting."
He gave Jilcu a gentle push in Jim's direction, and headed for the latrine.
When he came back to the campsite, the situation had changed. He and Jim and Jilcu had been at the edge of the encampment, far enough from the others that Jim could let his senses range. In the few minutes Blair was gone, Jim's solitary figure had become the still hub of a wheel of girls.
Which didn't sound so bad, except that they were all teenagers, and some dozen or so conversations in an equal number of languages rolled around the sentinel. Blair recognized Chinese and Thai for sure, and a snatch of Tagalog. This was serious. Jim was doing his "I'm about to explode" impression, hard to ignore and amazingly effective at quelling incipient urban unrest, but the girls didn't seem to notice.
"Uh, Jim, what happened?"
"Ask your little friend. She yelled something, and all the others came over and started jabbering. What were you two talking about before you ran off?"
"Uh, I just told her I'd act in loco parentis, that's all. Trying to reassure her, you know, so she'd calm down enough to let go of me. The Kambai have a very firm idea of paternal duties, and familial ties . . . ."
["Jilcu the daughter of Beler Sonberek asks that her father greet the sisters of Jilcu, the other daughters of his house-platform. Here is Li Hua and Jun and . . . ."]
ooooooo
Females often gravitated toward Sandburg, but this was ridiculous. A girl would come up to the kid and babble. He'd babble back, though not always in the same language. She'd bob, or bow, or genuflect. One girl lay on the ground and put her hair on Blair's feet. Then she pulled another girl forward and the whole thing started over. Everybody was staring.
"Hey, Darwin, what's going on?"
The last girl walked away from Blair to curl up with the rest. She was smiling. Several of them were. It looked unnatural, on faces that had been sober for so long.
"I don't have any cigars."
Okay. They'd made a left turn into the Sandburg zone again.
"What?"
"I'll have to ask Simon if he'll hand them out for me." Blair said. "I'm a father. Oh, man, am I a father! I need to come up with some kind of pan-cultural adoption ritual in a hurry. See, I told Jilcu I was sort of her adopted father. And she decided that all the other girls were her adopted sisters, because they'd lived on the same platform -- that's the ship they were in -- so I have to be their father too."
"You're supposed to be their daddy? Ridiculous."
"Maybe something with the same symbolism as cigars. Sausages?"
"Stop it. Tell them they made a mistake."
The whole idea was ridiculous. No-one in the world -- in any world -- was less fatherly than Blair. Yes, he'd calmed down a couple of the girls who kept sobbing. He listened to their stories while Jim and Simon and the others were rebuilding lean-to shelters. He managed by mime and a few broken words to explain where they should sleep and also, blushing, where to take care of other matters.
But setting limits would be impossible, for a guy who didn't admit to any. Yelling at the kids, making sure they toed the line . . . . Blair was just a kid himself. Why should these teenagers trust him? Jim certainly hadn't, not until the kid knocked him down and kept him from being creamed by a garbage truck. Not always, even afterwards.
Look at him now. Staring at Jim with puppy-dog eyes like he was eight years old and wanted a fire truck for Christmas. He didn't look old enough to nurse a beer, let alone a traumatized child.
"They need somebody, Jim. Being stranded is scary for all of us, but at least all you guys from the station know you can rely on each other. I mean, you're sort of like family, right? The girls don't have any reason to trust us though. In most cultures the only halfway reliable allies belong to kin-groups. Under the circumstances it's a psychologically reasonable adaptation."
"If they want a father-figure, let Simon have them. Or Joel. Someone who's got half a chance to pull it off."
"Why not me?"
"Two words, kid. Table leg."
It was the nastiest thing he could think of to say. He knew it, and he said it anyway. Blair's silence told him he was in trouble.
They had both frozen, like duellists after the shots were fired, waiting to see who would fall. When the younger man finally spoke, his voice was so low Jim had to screen out the babbling teenagers to hear it. The white taut hands didn't move at all.
"Ushi's father sold her in the marketplace, to a woman who was going to the city. She thinks it was because she ate too much. The man who came to Jarita's village said he was hiring girls to work as hotel maids. Kim is about four months pregnant. She says she's fifteen already, but I think she's at least a year younger. The police sold Li Hua when they learned her mother didn't have enough money to buy herself out of jail. Kirsi's stepfather . . . ."
Jilcu knew something was wrong. She stared. Jim could hear her heart accelerate. He put his hands out, motioning traffic to a stop.
"I get the point already. I guessed their lives weren't sweetness and light."
"You thought I'd hit on them anyway."
Blair's voice was still flat.
"Wait a minute, Chief. I didn't mean . . . ."
"I don't think I should talk to you right now. Later. Maybe."
The kid was getting up. He was going to walk away. Blair didn't do that. He didn't walk away from a confrontation. He got right up in your face, and it didn't matter if you were twice his size, or armed, or out of your head. He kept plugging away until you saw things his way.
"So don't talk. Listen!"
Blair stopped, but he didn't turn around. A reprieve, but no pardon. Not yet. Time to talk fast.
"I was joking, that's all. You threw me for a loop. Or the kids did, or maybe this place. I was just trying to do something normal . . . ."
Did that sound as thin to Blair as it did to Jim? The kid turned around and stared. His frozen look vanished in a flare of comprehension. Jim would have felt relief, but he wasn't sure what Blair had seen. The look of analysis vanished just as quickly into an exaggerated huff.
"Teasing me is normal."
"Um, yeah. You didn't notice? I must be too subtle for you."
The kids hands were moving now, his face alive with indignation.
"You, subtle? I don't think so. Insulting. Demeaning. Insensitive . . . ."
"Yup." Jim said. "So, what else is new?"
He knew he'd gotten away with it when Blair snorted.
"Neanderthal."
"New age hippie."
"Tests." Blair said, and yawned. "Lots and lots of tests. Sense memory comparisons. What's different about this place, and what's the same. Actually, if we ever do have interplanetary exploration, sentinels would be practically necessary for first contact. Pick up trace organic compounds . . . ."
He almost hit himself in the face, trying to cover another monster yawn.
"A couple of your girls are out on their feet."
"My daughters." Blair said.
"If you sit down a little closer to the fire, maybe they'll follow your example. Tell 'em its curfew. Bedtime."
"Bedtime. Right."
He sat down. Jim managed not to ululate his victory.
Blair fell asleep leaning against him. In the dark nightmares came. Jim heard Jilcu stumble toward them. She froze when she saw Jim was awake. Huddled in her blanket like a cloak, rubbing tears off her face, she was ready to run. Jim patted the ground.
"Go ahead," he said, looking in another direction as if he was trying to lure a wary cat. "He wants you to feel safe. We're all going to do our damnedest to make sure you're safe."
She wasn't the only child to wake afraid. Jilcu, Sur and Radhu, all coccooned in their blankets, dozed off leaning against Blair. Chingwei, Ai, Tao and Jin Hee made do with Jim. Even after she'd stopped crying, Ai snuffled gently in her sleep. Puppies. They were tangled together like puppies. Blair wasn't shivering any more.
Jim saw a guardian with his face, awake on an empty blue plain. Blair, painted like a Chopec shaman, held a basket of palm fiber patterned with jaguar masks and the sacred mountain and the triumphant sun.
"What do we guard?" the guardian asked.
"A basket." Jim said.
"What do we guard?"
"Uh, treasure?"
Damn, he hated these riddle games. The spirit with Blair's form opened the basket. It was empty. Nothing but darkness inside.
"What do we guard?"
"Everything, man, everything." Blair murmured. "The future."
But he was still asleep. Jim listened to a heartbeat like a slow calm drum, and breath like the rolling surf. One of the children tried to roll over, and her neighbor protested.
"This." Jim thought. "Now."