Mary Caraker: Suffer the Children

Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg

Morgan arrived at her office late and found her communit blinking furiously. She picked it up, to be confronted on screen by Commander Prescott’s scowling visage.

“Where the hell have you been, Farraday? I’ve been calling you since eight thirty! SEF doesn’t keep bankers’ hours, you know. When you took this job….”

Morgan turned away from the viewer and rolled her eyes at Nils, her secretary. Commander Prescott knew perfectly well that she had been up half the night at a diplomatic reception—a function he had managed to avoid—and that none of the spaceforce offices opened before nine. The man was an inveterate worrier, and he had a short fuse. Usually, his eruptions were over nothing more serious than some Elyrian’s complaint about a teacher’s grading system, but this time his harangue did not exhaust itself after the customary two minutes.

“Farraday, are you listening? I can’t see you on my viz.”

Morgan detected a note of real urgency, composed her face to respectful attention and turned back to the screen. “Yes, Sir. What can I do for you?”

Morgan’s present Space Corps assignment, after almost twenty years of teaching on various planets, was supposed to be a sinecure: a personnel director’s post on Elyria, one of the most civilized of Space Exploratory Force’s worlds. She had done her stints in jungles and deserts and airless asteroids, and with retirement within sight she had been more than willing to settle for the comfort and safety of a desk job.

She hadn’t bargained for Commander Prescott, her immediate superior. Or for the boredom of reports and the budget problems, for the placating of parents and officials and the smiling, endlessly smiling, at receptions.

At least, Prescott disliked fawning and evasiveness as much as she did. Whatever his bad news, he would deliver it unembellished. He continued to scowl. “We need a teacher, in a hurry, for a special assignment. Who can you spare?”

How typical: no warning, no explanation. “Why, no one, at the moment,” Morgan said evenly. “Everyone in my region is at a school. With that flu in the archipelago, I don’t even have a substitute pool.”

“You’ve got to double up, then. Pull someone out.” He waved a helex flimsy. “This is from headquarters, and it’s not a request, it’s an order.”

Morgan did a quick mental survey, frowned and shook her head. “Can’t they get someone from North Continent? We’re really shorthanded here.”

“No!” Prescott’s face grew a shade redder. “There’s no time—it’s got to be us. The Flying Dutchman will be in docking orbit in four hours, and they want a Space Corps teacher waiting in the shuttle. They’ve got six Salassan kids aboard, with no one to look after them, and orders to get them to Salassa as fast as possible.

“Here—read it yourself.” A copy of the message appeared on Morgan’s screen, and she scanned it quickly.

The children, she learned, were survivors of a small, isolated Salassan colony that had been wiped out by a viral plague. With prompt treatment the epidemic needn’t have been fatal, but the Flying Dutchman, a cargo vessel hastily diverted to emergency medical service, had arrived too late with its serum to save the adult population. The six young children, though apparently immune to the virus, had suffered severe psychological damage. The Salassans insisted that they be returned to the home planet immediately, a journey of three weeks at the Dutchman’s fastest hyperspeed. Even the brief stop at Elyria had been protested by the Salassan command, but SEF insisted on taking on an experienced care-person for the children.

Salassa was not a SEF world. Its name, in the Finn language of its discoverer, meant “secret.” Morgan knew little about it—no one did—since the Salassans had not welcomed Captain Haapala’s visits, or any since by Space Exploratory Force’s starships. They traded solely within their own network of colonies, and only the untimely lack of any nearby Salassan vessels had forced them to accept the Dutchman’s assistance.

“Well?” The commander allowed Morgan little time for reflection. “Who’s it going to be? As you can see, we’ve got to act fast.”

Morgan took a deep breath. Salassa. A humanoid race rarely seen. A world shrouded in mystery. An opportunity she couldn’t bear to pass up. “I’ll go myself,” she said.

Prescott’s jaw dropped. “You?”

“Why not? It’s the logical solution. I’m here and I can be ready in time, which might not be possible for someone with a classroom of kids. More important, the Elyrians can’t object the way they would if I deprived them of an acting teacher. And I am experienced.” She didn’t say that she was also wildly eager to escape from her desk and her four walls, to have contact again with children, no matter how strange they might be. She hadn’t realized how much she would miss the grubby hands—furred or scaled or human—that she had guided onto pencils or keyboards, or the light in small faces when a new concept blossomed.

“I’d only be gone six weeks,” she continued, forestalling further objections. “Nils can handle the routine office work, and anything else, well, the two of you together—”

“Stop right there—I’m not taking on your job!” the commander sputtered.

“Think about it,” Morgan said. “I’ll be at your office in ten minutes.” She switched off her set and motioned for Nils to follow her out.

Commander Prescott’s office was at the far end of the block-long SEF building, but Morgan did not hurry to confront him. Once he had time to cool off and assess the situation, he would see that she was right.

Nils agreed. “He’ll come around,” he said as they walked. “And don’t worry about the reports—I’ll see that they get out.” He made a mock solemn face. “I’ll miss you, though. Maybe you’ll… maybe I’ll look better to you when you get back.”

Morgan laughed. Nils knew perfectly well how attractive he was to most women, with his arresting combination of blond hair and brown skin, and that it wasn’t his appearance that made her keep their relationship strictly business. Nils was barely twenty—a mere child in Morgan’s estimation. She was forty-two, though due to an inadvertent rejuvenation when she had been wounded on her last assignment and spent time in a regen tank, she looked considerably younger. She had found the erasing of age traces not an unalloyed blessing. Nils’s puppyish advances were no problem—she was, after all, his boss—but harder to deal with were the attitudes of her own superiors, who tended to believe the evidence of their eyes rather than the service emblems on her sleeve.

Morgan wore her brown hair in a neat bun and eschewed makeup, but still she knew that she appeared far from a seasoned professional. Commander Prescott treated her with none of the respect due her position, and at last night’s reception the governor had excluded her from all serious conversation while he had listened at length to her junior counterpart from North Continent.

“I’m glad someone will miss me,” Morgan said. A sudden new worry surfaced; one that she realized she should have considered before volunteering so precipitously. “What if you’re the only one who does? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” If SEF found out how expendable she was…