Steven Harper - Nightmare

Ara didn’t answer. Once again, her gaze was fixed in the distance.

"Mother Ara?" Kendi said. "Are you all right?"

She blinked. "Wool-gathering again. Sorry. Did you ask something?"

"ZbeingChildciting?" Kite repeated.

"Is being a Child exciting? It depends on what you do," Ara said. "I do field work and recruiting, so sometimes I run into …challenges." She laughed. "I have more fake IDs than most criminals. But I’m the exception. Most of us relay communication through the Dream or teach or do research. Once you get your degree, you can do pretty much whatever you want."

"Degree?" Willa whispered.

"Oh yes. You have to have a degree to operate in the Dream. Or you do if you want to work for us, anyway. The monastery will provide you with an extensive general education and you can choose a couple specialties."

"Like what?" Jeren asked.

Their food arrived. The server placed high-piled plates in front of them. Kendi had ordered a ham sandwich with french fries-some foods had apparently lasted across centuries and light years-and the salty smells that assailed his nose were delicious. The sandwich all but dripped with some sort of white sauce with a sweet, spicy tang to it. The fries were hot and crisp, and Kendi almost groaned when he ate the first one. French fries hadn’t been on the menu for slaves at Giselle Blanc’s frog farm and it had been years since he’d tasted them.

The server left, and Ara answered Jeren’s question. "You can specialize in just about anything offered at a non-Silent university. Math, music, computers, genetics, piloting-"

Kendi all but bolted upright in his chair. "Piloting? You mean like spaceship piloting?"

"Sure. We always need good pilots in the field. You can study anything you wish. As Irfan said, ‘The greater your knowledge, the lesser your risk.’ "

Kendi saw himself at the helm of a starship, swooping through a field of enemy fire, dodging laser beams by the thinnest of margins. The science fiction sims had been his favorites when he was a kid, and he had always wanted to be the one in the pilot seat in every game. Not only that, as a pilot he’d have a better chance of getting out into space and finding his family.

"Kendiareyouhey!" Kite snatched back his hand but not before the jolt slapped Kendi all the way down to his feet. He rubbed his arm where Kite had touched him.

"Careful, guy," Dorna said. "Whenever you touch someone around here for the first time, you’re likely to get jolted."

"Sorrykendi," Kite said.

"It’s okay." Kendi continued rubbing his arm, and something occurred to him. "My mom is Silent. How come I never felt a jolt from her?"

"I imagine you touched your mother all the time," Ara said. "You probably got jolted at some point-most Silent start that up at about age ten-but since you didn’t know what it was, you may have figured it was something like a static electricity shock and forgotten about it."

Kendi looked down at his sandwich piled high with tender ham and wondered what his mother was eating. Suddenly even the fries seemed less appetizing. "I’m going to find her, and the rest of them. They’re out there, and I’ll find them eventually no matter what."

"We’ll help you," Ara said seriously. "The Children don’t condone slavery-Irfan herself was dead set against it-and we work hard to get people out of it wherever we can."

The Children would help him? That made Kendi feel a little better. And it did make sense. After all, Ara had freed him . But how long would it take before he could go looking, and how long would it take to find them?

"Irfan was the first Silent human, right?" Jeren said. "Everyone talks about her like she’s some kind of goddess. Do you guys pray to her or what?"

Ara smiled. "The Children don’t tell you who to pray to. But Irfan Qasad was an intelligent, powerful woman, and a lot of people call on her memory for guidance. She governed Bellerophon for a long time until she resigned to start the Children, and it was because of her that Silent communication became essential to the galaxy. It was that communication that allowed the invention of slipships, in fact." Ara’s voice was full of admiration.

"What happened to her?" Kendi asked.

"History is unclear," Ara said. "Most of her writings were lost or destroyed, and Irfan herself quietly vanished. Not even her own children seemed to know where she went-or they pretended they didn’t. Some people say she went back to her husband Daniel Vik." Ara spat the name as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. "But I’m not one of them. Irfan Qasad wouldn’t be so stupid."

"Who was Daniel Vik?" Jeren said.

"A filthy man, one of the worst villains in history," Ara told him. "He hated all Silent and went literally insane when he discovered Silence among his own children. Why Irfan married him in the first place is a mystery. When she finally saw through Vik and demanded a divorce, he retaliated by kidnapping one of their sons and running off to the other side of the continent to what eventually became the city-state Othertown. Some people take the fact that he left as evidence that he wasn’t actually the father of her children-or at least of the ones he abandoned. Vik assassinated his way to dictatorship and declared his intention to start a genocidal war on all human Silent. Irfan barely managed to stop him, though she couldn’t remove him from office. She worked the rest of her life to keep him from starting that war."

"What happened to him?" Kendi asked, fascinated.

"He was assassinated himself," Ara said. "A deserving end, if you ask me. Now who’s up for dessert? The ice cream here is really good."

After lunch, Ara took them back to the monastery, where in a bright, airy room they took a battery of tests in a variety of subject matters. The tests, Ara told them, would give the Children an idea of what classes each of them would need and what aptitudes each of them might have. When the results came back, Kendi found he had scored well in math and poorly in everything else. Humiliation burned in his cheeks when he saw that his scores were the lowest in the entire group. Ara, noticing his discomfort, drew him aside and put an arm around him.

"You have nothing to be ashamed of," she told him quietly. "You’ve been in cryo-sleep for nine hundred years and after that you were kept in ignorance on a backwoods frog farm. The principles of general mathematics haven’t changed in nine hundred years, but everything else has. No one thinks you’re stupid, Kendi. Certainly not me. Everything I’ve seen about you tells me you’re frighteningly intelligent, and I think your teachers are in for a challenge if they want to keep up with you."

Kendi managed a nod. He still felt stupid.

"And look at this." Ara pointed to a section on the computer pad’s holographic screen that reported his scores in dreadful red numbers. "You do have an aptitude for piloting. When you’re a little older, they’ll want to start you on it."

Kendi’s eyes went round. Excitement made short work of the humiliation. "You think so?"

"Looks that way to me. We’ll have to see." She turned to the others. "It’s getting on toward supper. Your clothes should have been delivered to your rooms by now. Why don’t all of you go unpack and eat? The evening is yours to do as you like. There’s a sim parlor on the bottom floor of the dorm if you’re into that. Explore the place or laze around-whatever you want to do."

When Kendi got back to his room, he found a large box on his bed. His clothes had arrived as Ara had predicted. Humming to himself, he opened the package and froze. With an astonished whistle he reached inside and pulled out the suede jacket. The smell of fine leather instantly surrounded him. A paper note was pinned to the lapel. If you can’t think of it as a gift from me, think of it as an indulgence from Irfan. Best, Mother Ara.