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So what are you going to do, Mom?Esteban wanted to know. He’d figured out the concept of consequences – when you drop a rock in a pond, the ripples always spread. And Aunt Tina? What’s she going to do?
You’re going to have to ask your Aunt Tina what she intends to do. I’d love to keep her on, but there are a lot of reasons it’s a bad idea for me to keep being a Vector Pilot under these circumstances. She signed on for the benefits to her career as insystem crew the job would give her. Tina loved the kids; maybe she’d stay a while. But she shouldn’t have any trouble landing a job as an insystem merchant ship’s commander if she wanted – this was the sort of chance insystem crews usually only got in the military. That was the prize she’d had her eye on when she signed on. Well, that and the speculative chance of going operant.
But that was dodging the real question. I’d been the Dog Lady on Earth, but ever since I’d left, I’d been a Vector Pilot, the Imperial equivalent of an intergalactic trucker, broken only by a stint in the military. I really didn’t know what I’d do when that option was off the table. Maybe I’ll just concentrate on raising the five of you for a few years. Across the millions of light years between us, Asto sent me a mental snort indicating I was lying to myself. The universe knew Asto and I had plenty of money. We never needed to work again if we didn’t want to. But that’s not the way either one of us was programmed, and we both knew it. I’d think of something; I just had no ideas at the moment.
But I did have to break the news to Tina. She deserved to know as soon as I could tell her in person. After dinner, I gathered the kids and headed up to the piloting station. The dogs followed as a matter of course. They went where their people went. “Tina, I have some news that affects you, too. Asto got the berth in maintenance and repair, so we’re going to be living in the Residence to be with him. I’ll gladly keep you on at your current pay level and get you an apartment in the Residence, but I know it’s not what you had in mind when you took the job.”
Miss Chief demanded to be picked up by scratching Tina’s pants; she knew there was no reason Tina couldn’t pet her while piloting. Tina ignored her for the moment. She was a tallish willowy brunette, just dark-skinned enough that people in our California childhood knew she was Mexican and not white, not that it made any difference in the sort of schools we’d both gone to. She kept her long, dark wavy hair pinned up while she was piloting.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet, Tia. When do you have to know?” She gave in to Mischief’s importuning, bending to help the little golden dog up into her lap. Mischief and Scarecrow loved the kids, but the kids were kids and sometimes startled them. Tina and I and sometimes Asto were their real people for now. Esteban was learning; Scarecrow could see that he was the best chance for attention now, and made his own overtures for attention there.
“I’ll be selling the pilot module, but you can just move into the Residence until you make up your mind what you want to do. Take your time.” It wasn’t like Tina couldn’t have decided to move on at any time. After five years working with me, she’d had the career boost she’d wanted for some time.
None of the kids needed sleep. Being operant meant they could easily go several days without, same as me. But after dinner, the ritual was always the same. Baths, and then give sleep a chance for an hour. I had to help Imtara with her bath; at about ten Earth months she wasn’t quite coordinated enough to be able to bathe herself safely, but Ilras at two Earth years of age was fine by himself, as were Ilora at three and Esteban at four. Even Imtara was safe enough, she just didn’t get clean on her own. Technically, none of them were Seventh Order Guardians yet, but they’d all been operant from conception. It made motherhood so much easier in terms of physical demands that it seemed like cheating.
In terms of mental demands, however, it made parenting natural state kids seem like a cakewalk. Baby Alden wanted to learn, and he wasn’t even born yet. In order to keep him safely swaddled, I had to devote two of my para to him full time as an interface between him and the universe. He was already prepared to take at least half a dozen tests for level four competency – about the equivalent of mastering a lower division college curriculum – as well as several lesser tests. The other four shared four more paraI’d had to devote to them to monitor what they were doing, help them with their learning, keep them on task, and keep them as safe as I could from outside threats. That wasn’t perfect, as I’d found out while carrying Esteban – experiencing a duel in the womb wasn’t something I’d recommend for any child. I’m not going write down how many total para I had, but my usual practice of devoting three to Vector piloting left me feeling stretched.
There had been benefits, however. Without Esteban, I’d have been killed by that djhanta who blamed me for his own shortcomings, and I’d gained Fourth Order power as a result of the duel, which had been gradually improved by keeping up with my wunderkind children to the point where my mental prowess was now well above the Natsi Cutoff. Any future children I had would all be operant – not Seventh Order, but operant – even if I lost Asto somehow. I didn’t think it likely I’d make the Sixth Order transition any time soon – I wasn’t the strongest or best integrated even of the family spouses – but Scimtar thought it was within the realm of possibility.
Publicly, however, I was still only admitting to Second Order. I wore the Second Order gold triangle with a stick figure human when protocol demanded, not the green of Fourth Order. Asto knew my real power, the kids probably knew, and a few of the other Scimtars, notably Anara, Gilras, Helene, and Scimtar himself. As far as the rest of the Empire was concerned, I was still a middling strong Second Order Guardian.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t Fourth Order in reality, however. The difference between Fourth Order and Second was more than just power. It was like I’d crossed some kind of threshold, and the universe actually wanted to help me exercise my operant abilities. It didn’t make much difference to auros, but for all the other disciplines and their combinations, I’d had to learn to restrain myself. It somehow took less in terms of absolute power to achieve the same results, and my integration had improved almost overnight from lowish-middling gold well into the blue range. I wasn’t as focused as Asto and probably never would be, but it had sharply narrowed the difference.
The next step, if I ever took it, would be into Sixth Order. Since there were a total of nineteen known Sixth Order Guardians in the Empire in all the teeming sixtillions of people in the Empire, I wasn’t expecting it soon. Even given the fact that sandbagging your abilities was the Unofficial Imperial Sport and there might have been several sixties of Sixth Order Guardians in actuality, those still weren’t common odds. I’d met Scimtar’s Sixth Order ally Deltos. I suspected Enolan, another of Scimtar’s allies I’d also met, of being Sixth Order in reality even though he admitted to only Fourth. I had a long way to go to match either, let alone my husband’s family.
More important, however, was the question of what I was going to do with myself when Vector piloting was taken off the list of options. The Scimtars were among the most important families of the Empire. Returning openly to the Residence would advertise precisely which pilot module I was in to all the other players of Imperial politics. Theoretically, the children should have been safe and I should have been safe enough. In reality, an easy, fat, tempting, high payoff target will have people shooting at it regardless of the rules.
I could have gone back to the dog business. I still owned a quarter of it outright, and my sister Dalia would hire me in a shot to run the Imperial end of things. But I’d been the boss of that business; I had no taste for returning as a subordinate no matter how important. What I wanted was another entrepreneurial credit to my resume. I was working on an idea in the back of my mind, but it would have to wait until the kids were grown.
I could just hang around the Residence and take care of my children until they were adults. This would have been a perfectly acceptable thing even within House Scimtar, but I expected more from myself. I could spend some of the time narrowing the educational gap between Asto and myself, and I’d probably do some of that, even though I knew I was kidding myself about the ‘narrowing’ part. Asto kept learning like it was some kind of religion, and his mind was still more capable than mine, no matter how you sliced it. I’d wanted to raise the kids; that was on me. Asto wanted to help, but it wasn’t his focus. It couldn’t be; he still had over thirty years left on his military contract and I’d known when I got pregnant the first time he wouldn’t be in a position to relieve me for any significant period until after they were adults. It had been my decisions to first, carry Esteban the natural way, and second, to pop them out as fast as I could, just over an Imperial year between each of them.
I could ask Anana if there was any work available among the family’s commercial interests that would fit with child rearing. I was sure she’d find me something. Even if I was only a family member by marriage, there were things she needed family members for because nobody else could be trusted to the same degree. Or I could change my focus, and ask Helene for an apprenticeship. She was considered one of the Empire’s most rounded entertainers. The thought of being a singer, actress, dancer, or all three did have a certain appeal, if only as a complete change from what I’d done in the past. But she’d been working the field since before the Interregnum and she had something I was pretty certain I didn’t: talent. Besides, ‘no nude scenes’ wasn’t even a concept in the Empire. Actors and actresses did what the script required. Period. I knew I could prevent myself from getting pregnant and cure any disease I might possibly catch, but I couldn’t see myself having sex with an actor or actress on the strength of nothing more than they were cast in the appropriate part. I’d insisted on exclusivity with Asto; I wasn’t about to ask him to change our contract now. It wasn’t porn as Earth had understood the concept (although the Empire had that, too), but Imperial drama didn’t shy away from the subject as even the most exhibitionist cultures on Earth had. In dramatic presentations as well as in real life, husbands and wives had sex, as did boyfriends and girlfriends, or any number of other combinations. I knew what Imperial entertainment was like; trying to find roles that didn’t call for it would be difficult for a newcomer. So that idea was pretty much out.
You’re not going to figure it out right now, Asto told me through our link. He was right. I decided to mostly shelve it while remaining alert for ideas until I’d fulfilled my remaining contracts and had the kids safely ensconced in the Residence and the pilot module sold.
Copyright 2018 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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