Lesson

2032 April 19 11:37
Test Year 5, Day 140, 12:00 CST
Tau, Caltech, Tournament Park

The kids were happy. Two to four-and-a-half year-olds played, stumbling over the playground equipment, clambering under the picnic tables, and running around so that the grass was hard pressed to stay in the ground. Crickets and tauhoppers chirped and buzzed. On the track and field over the fence, goats bleated. It had been a year and a half since the Californian Techers had been able to move back home, and neither the goats nor the children had much memory of the three weeks they’d spent in the mineshaft barracks.

Melinda looked around, smiling faintly and wistfully as she very slowly sipped at the third cup of coffee she had had since leaving Earth. She was in civvies today: faded and patched jeans, two worn shirts, one on top of the other, and her last pair of factory-made shoes, although long habit meant she had a knife concealed. The kids wore the assortment of clothes that their parents had made. There were a few Earth-made outfits scavenged from the nursery, but most wore cotton or jute homespun with insulating layers of cashmere or chiengora. They had improvised sandals of zard leather.

Sarah was in an argument with Zmago Chamer, Mina and Will’s oldest by twelve minutes and known to everyone, especially himself, as ‘Z’. If Melinda parsed their Techer children’s pidgin correctly, he’d stolen the older child’s share of the vitamin candy Venkat made for them. The girl was still a little on the short side for her age, due to the trauma of her first few months, but she was full of life and remarkably assertive.

Sarah knew some of the story of her parents: that they had been far to the west of campus when she was born, that her father had died and her mother had started to carry her back towards home, to fall just after she had brought Sarah to Melinda and entrust her welfare to her. The rest of the story she would learn in time. But for the moment, the girl was more interested in the Examiners and Earth.

Melinda had become Sarah’s guardian, although she tried to avoid the title and formality of ‘step-mother’ and had had to leave her in the care of Will and Mina when her ninja duties conflicted with Sarah’s awake hours. Still, she took a great deal of interest in the girl’s education. Following the Socratic and one-on-one intensive teaching style that Will had recommended, she did a lot of it herself. She’d started to teach some of the other children as well. The Degree Committee had given her a masters of education after Will, with his honorary doctorates, had vouched for her readiness.

Today, she just had three students: Sarah, Z and his sister Karen. She was supposed to teach a little science, but they had already been educated in a little basic physics in the evening sessions in Mina’s living room. Since they understood that Tau went around the star and not the other way round, after resolving the disagreement by dispensing two vitamin lemon drops, Melinda asked them what they’d like to talk about. Seeing and smelling the coffee, Sarah wanted to know what chocolate tasted like, and had to be satisfied by an inadequate comparison to some of the synthetics and the mole plant. Cocoa seeds had been in very short supply in the seeds requested from the Examiners, and none of the trees had taken. As far as sweets went, the vitamin drops and jelly beans hidden in plastic shells were all the kids knew.

Karen asked the first question that caused the ninja to pause: “Does the Easter Bunny come to the Examiners?”

Melinda gave a careful and lengthily answer. In words that the kids understood, she developed ideas and let them reason it out. They decided that they did not know if the Examiners celebrated holidays and that the Easter Bunny was a human institution or myth associated with a religious feast scheduled by the position of the Earth and its Moon in their orbits. Melinda smiled at the end of that discussion.

Among the Techers, there was a division of opinion on teaching the children mythology as fact, since too many of them would say “My parents told me so.” as their reason for abusing someone who didn’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. But the Examiners had to be treated separately, since they were no myth. It was hard enough to convince the children that the yellow star Boötes was home to seven billion people, although that was waning now that some of them knew how to read.

The rest of the session went well, if just as complicated for the teacher. The kids were learning to think for themselves, and would have been a torture for the bulk instruction of the schools of Earth.