Steven Harper - Nightmare

Festival night , he thought. Beginnings, changes, and new directions. Well here’s a change for you.

Kendi flung his clay bowl over the edge. He heard it collide with something, probably a tree branch, and shatter. They wanted resolutions? Here was a resolution-from now on, Kendi was going to leave well enough alone, no matter how lonely he got.

And he wasn’t going to cry about it. No, he wasn’t.

The latter resolution lasted less than a minute.

Mother Ara turned a baleful eye on Kendi and Jeren. Kendi tried to meet it and found he couldn’t. Mother Ara had the best glare of anyone he’d ever met and he still couldn’t stand up to it. Even after repeated practice.

"Didn’t we go through this at Festival last year?" she growled. "I truly don’t know what to do with you two."

"You could-" Kendi began.

"I didn’t mean for you to give an answer," Mother Ara snapped. "I’m tired of all this. You’ve been here for-what? — a year now. An entire year. You’ve signed your contracts with the Children, you have your own teachers, you wear the ruby ring. And still you keep breaking the rules. This may come as a surprise to the both of you, but yes, it is against the rules to hijack an ultralight and buzz a pod of mickey spikes. You caused a stampede, for god’s sake. What if someone had been standing in the way? They would have been killed."

"I-" Jeren said.

"And don’t think I know how it all works by now," Mother Ara continued ruthlessly. "You, Jeren, cook up some cockeyed scheme and you egg Kendi into joining you. Kendi, I’m especially surprised at you. I thought you’d been making real progress. Then you go and do this. What would the Real People say about that kind of treatment toward animals?"

Kendi ground his teeth. That line always got to him, and Mother Ara knew it. He replied with the only defense he knew. "Most of them are dead. They don’t say much."

"Don’t get flip," she answered. "You know I’m right. And you, Jeren …"

In the end, they each got an extra four hours of work detail. As they headed out the door of Mother Ara’s tiny office at the monastery, Mother Ara called out, "Kendi, wait a moment."

Jeren caught Kendi’ eye. "I’ll catch you outside," he murmured, and shut the door.

Kendi turned back. Mother Ara was still sitting behind her desk, her hands folded on top of it. The little room was crammed with …stuff. Kendi couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. Shelves of bookdisks on the walls, a bulletin board covered with cartoons and little comics, two small statues of Irfan Qasad serving as bookends, brightly-woven wall hangings with quilting and tassels, little trinkets-some tacky, some tasteful-and a dozen awards and framed certificates all crowded around a desk top littered with more disks, a data pad, and a portable telephone. Two pots of red and blue flowers had been somehow squeezed in as a concession to Festival. A head-and-shoulders hologram of a teenage boy with red hair and blue eyes occupied the ledge below the room’s only window. The boy was good-looking and bore no resemblance to Mother Ara whatever. Kendi wondered who he was. Nephew? Family friend? He was definitely cute, whoever he was.

Mother Ara gestured to one of two chairs opposite the desk. "Kendi, sit down again."

Kendi obeyed with all the annoyed reluctance he could muster. She had already slammed him with more work detail. Like he had a lot of free time as it was. Now she going to hit him with something more? He mentally reviewed the recent past, trying to remember if he had done anything else she could get him for. He had broken the dorm curfew for underage students twice last week, but no one had caught him sneaking in, he was sure. His grades weren’t great right now, but official reports weren’t due out for almost a month, so it couldn’t be that. Unless one of his teachers had complained about him. He clenched his jaw. That was probably it. Sister Bren must have called Mother Ara again. Sister Bren had had it in for him since the first day of class, and Mother Ara would take her side. She always did.

"I’ve been wondering if you’ve given any more thought to the suggestion I made to you last week," Mother Ara said. "And the week before that. And last month."

The head of steam that had been building up inside Kendi abruptly evaporated. He knew what she was talking about, but pretended ignorance. "Suggestion?"

"Do you think about your family a lot?" Mother Ara asked.

Kendi nodded. "Yeah. So?"

"I’m not accusing you of anything, Kendi. I’m worried about you."

Kendi just looked at her without speaking.

"I said it before-you’ve been through a lot," Mother Ara said. "That kind of thing makes you angry, and the anger doesn’t just go away because you’ve been freed from slavery."

Kendi remained silent.

"You’re not alone, Kendi," Mother Ara continued quietly. She pushed aside a couple data disks and leaned her elbows on the desk. "The Children take care of their own, and you’re one of us. Kendi, please-let’s make arrangements for you to talk to someone about what you’ve been through."

"You mean a therapist. Someone who talks to crazy people."

"A counselor," Mother Ara said. "Someone who listens and helps you through-"

"I don’t have time," Kendi interrupted. "All that work detail."

"If you’ll agree to see someone, I’ll cancel the work detail."

"Is that why you gave it to me?" Kendi snapped back. "To blackmail me into seeing a therapist?"

Mother Ara’s face clouded and she looked ready to give a sharp retort, then stopped herself. "You know that’s not the case, Kendi. I want to help you. The pain you’re in is-"

"— is none of your business. Look, can I go now? I have stuff to do."

Mother Ara sighed. "All right. But at least think about what I said, all right? And don’t forget your lesson this afternoon."

"Yeah, sure," Kendi said in his least convincing voice. "Can I go?"

Mother Ara nodded and Kendi quickly left the office. Who did she think she was? Who did she think he was? Some kind of loony? Yeah, he was angry, but he was angry at Mother Ara for giving him work detail, at Sister Bren for getting on his case all the time. If they just left him alone, he’d be fine.

Outdoors, Kendi wandered over to a railing and peered down into the green depths of the forest below. Festival flowers and decorations had sprouted on houses, balconies, and walkways everywhere. It was sunny, the first sunny day after a solid week of clouds, and the air was balmy and warm, exactly as it had been on the day he had first arrived on Bellerophon last year. A lot had happened in that time. Kendi had gained several centimeters of height and survived a year of classes without exactly failing any of them. It hadn’t been easy. More than once he had been tempted to take the free one-way passage Mother Ara said he could use whenever he wanted and run off to search for his family. But each time he hadn’t gone through with it. Part of it was practicality-he had no idea where to start looking. There was also the fact that he knew his mother was Silent. The most viable place to find her, it seemed to Kendi, was the Dream, with the Children to help him. That meant working hard to reach the place himself. More than once, however, he lost sight of this and Mother Ara was always there when it happened.

"So what’d she want?" Jeren asked at his elbow. Kendi jumped.

"Don’t do that," he said. "All life, you scared the shit out of me."

Jeren grinned. "Good. So what’d she want?"