Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Travails with Momma, Part 1

Written by John Ringo

Illustrated by Phil Renne

[1: Paradise Sucks]

"JOSH!"

Josh Parker ignored his mother, leaving his eyes closed as he kept reading.

The book was pretty good, a collection of short biographies of the space aces of the Second Orion War. It was split between the Ortulian front and the Joostan so there was a lot of variety. But the basic theme, Terran superiority in space combat, was what Josh liked. That's what he wanted to be, a fighter pilot.

He brought up a toolie and began blasting the wicked Ortulians that had started the war by the sneak attack on Diamond Haven. Ortulian fighters fell around his invincible Devilspray space fighter as he flew among the stars . . . but he had to rescue the beautiful princess . . . Cindy Goodhead. Cindy was so cute. She was in his reading class and . . .

"JOSH! COME DOWN HERE THIS INSTANT!"

The image of his mother's face appeared in the middle of the combat and with a wave of her hand the fighters and stars disappeared, along with the picture of Cindy tied up in the middle of ten bug-eyed, octopoid Ortulians he was just preparing to defeat in bloody hand to hand combat after which, if he was lucky, he might get a peck on the cheek from Cindy and then they'd have about a half a dozen children . . .

"I have to talk to you, Josh. Now."

"Oh, Mother," he memed. "Can't you talk to me here?"

"Now, Josh. Downstairs."

Josh opened his eyes, wiping the toolie, and shuffled across the room disconsolately. He kicked a datacube out of his way and a blue tunic, making a path through the clutter to the room iris.

The house was old fashioned and to make his way to the kitchen he had to walk down stairs instead of using a bounce tube. Sure, it was only one floor, but everybody had bounce tubes.

This was the third house they'd occupied in the Alu Islands. Dad was working on the new Malt Whiskey Corporation theme park outside Greater Papua and after the project got extended by another year, and their lease was up on the house outside Papua, Mom had picked them up and brought them to the Alu. It meant a one hour air-car commute each way for Dad, but Mom was in charge of housing and she could be less than subtle. From her point of view, it was Time To Leave.

"What do you want, Mother?" Josh said as he entered the kitchen. "Couldn't you just meme me?"

"Mouths are for talking," his mother said. "Implants are for learning."

He hated that expression.

Mom was just pulling a roast out of the fresher and his stomach growled.

"Can I have a snack?"

"No," his mother snapped. "You won't have any room for supper."

"But all I want is a choco-bar," Josh whined.

"Two or three, more like it," his mother said with her standard sniff. "We're moving back to Bowan."

"They're finished?" Josh said. "Gosh."

"With phase three," his mother replied. "So we're going back to the home office."

"Do we get a house this time?" Josh asked. "I'd really like a house. I want a dog, Mom."

"No, we'll be in an apartment," his mother replied. "It will be an hour until supper. You need to do something besides read in your room. Outside."

"Oh, Mom," Josh whined. "It's boring!"

"It's a nice day out," his mother answered. "Go."

Josh schlepped out through the back iris and frowned at the view. Waving coconut palms and a pink sand beach surrounded a crystalline cove. The houses around the cove were set back from the beach so that they were barely in view and, except for one or two locals out catching the sun or fishing, the cove was almost deserted. The trade winds blew in a constant stream, lowering the temperature to what most humans considered idyllic.

Josh went down to the waterside and kicked at the sand. When they'd first come to the Alu Islands, he'd gone swimming nearly every day and turned brown as a nut, his dark brown hair shading to almost white at the tips. It still was bleached and he still had the tan but he'd hardly swam a week at a time anymore. Even swimming in crystalline water could get boring day in and day out. And while Alu was one of prettiest places they'd ever lived, and he'd lived in a bunch of places, there weren't many kids his own age around.

If they could just settle down for a while. A year here, a year there, by the time the local kids had gotten over beating him up and stealing his lunch money and started to let him steal other kids', it was time to move. They'd lived for two years in Greater Papua, right on a river, and that had been great. Sure, he had to take getting beaten up a time or two not to mention the ritual jokes about having his head collected, but he'd made friends. Had a bunch of kids to play with.

He wandered along the beach in a deep funk, watching the animals along the waterline. He saw a purple and pink crab in the water and stopped.

"That's what I want to be," he said. "A superhero! Crab-man!" He held his hands up and made clacking sounds. "Crab-man! With pincers of . . . super hero stuff!" Clack, clack. By day, Crab-man was an unassuming fourth grade student. But by night he . . . rescued damsels in distress. Especially Cindy Goodhead!

"Oh, Crab-man, you're my hero," Cindy said, breathlessly.

"Well, there were only a hundred of them," Crab-man said in a deep voice. He had the arms and legs of a crab but his body was rippling with muscles and he had a really handsome face and black hair and bright green eyes . . . "You know, Cindy, by day I'm really . . ."

No, that wouldn't work. Super-heroes never gave away their secret identity. She'd just have to work it out herself and then they'd live in a big house on the top of a mountain and make pancakes while the snow fell and have about . . . oh, nineteen kids . . .

****

Steve Parker sent a command to the airtruck, shutting it down, and dilating the door. He climbed out and stretched his back, wincing. Flying an hour either way to work was . . . well, when he'd started it nine months before he'd called it a pain. Now he had an entirely new appreciation for the term.

But that was about over. For good or ill. Working on the Malt Whiskey project had given him a billing rate that was astronomical. Yara and Barchick had been happy as hell about it. Unfortunately, the number of fifteen billion credit projects to be had on Terra was . . . small. The planet had all the infrastructure it could handle and there just wasn't room for the sort of massive projects he specialized in.

The term he was groping for here was "redundant." As in, "I'm sorry, Mr. Parker, you're simply redundant to our current needs."

With five kids in college or just starting out in independent life, not to mention a wife and kid at home to support, that was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Which was why he'd pulled every string he had to keep working on Malt Whiskey, long after less competent, and less expensive, engineers could have wrapped it up.

Before Malt Whiskey he'd spent three solid years doing failure analysis on other planets, especially ones with harsh soil and working conditions. It had been fun, figuring out what other people had screwed up always was, but he'd seen his wife and kids exactly eighty-seven days in those three years. He wasn't looking forward to that, either.

Something would come up. Something always did.

****

"How was your day, dear?" Jala said, ladling spaghetti sauce onto Steve's noodles.

"Fine," Steve said. "Whiskey Corporate sent another hot-shot out to reinvent the wheel . . ."

Josh tuned out his parent's conversation, twirling the spaghetti. Wrapped in rings of . . . really strong stuff, Spaghetti-man . . .

"Do you have another project?" Jala asked, in a tone that bespoke calm disinterest overlaid with worry.

"No," Steve replied, calmly. "They want me to do . . . sales for a while."

"Oh."

Josh had learned to not even turn an ear or look up. Grownups would drop the most important information if they were sure you weren't paying attention. And knowing where you were going to live, for a kid, was really important information.

"So, we'll be at the home office for a while."

"Do we have an apartment, yet?" Jala asked.

"No, we'll stay in a hotel while you look for one."

Josh conjured up his memory of Bowan. Tier upon tier of skyscrapers and megascrapers reaching for the sky. Green? Some of the signs were green, maybe. Water? Sure, it comes out of a tap. Bowan. Well, at least there were kids his age. Approximately nine billion.

He actually sort of liked Bowan, what he remembered of it. Mostly an apartment and the airbus to school. He'd only been in kindergarten and first grade in Bowan, though. He couldn't remember much. The megascraper had a pool, several actually, but one he could go to. Not by himself, of course, but maybe he'd be old enough, now. And the subcomplex they lived in had board tracks. He wanted to ask if they were going back to the same complex but then they'd know he'd been listening.

Worst of all, though, he knew the tone. This was a temp. Dad would just be hanging out until they figured out what to do with him next. He might be around for a month but more likely he'd be gone all the time. When they'd lived in Bowan before, there had been brothers and sisters, mostly Anna and Cho. Sure, Cho had been a bastard most of the time, but at least he was somebody to nag. A brother was a brother.

This time it would just be him and Mom in an apartment.

They'd kill each other in a week.

Spaghetti man wraps tendrils of . . . really strong stuff around his mother's neck.

Bad.

****

He'd learned the hard way. The bungalow was rented so this time they didn't even have to wait for movers. The next day the back of the aircar was packed with stuff, so was the trunk and most of the backseat; Dad had already sent the company's airtruck back to the site on remote. Josh had packed his stuff the night before; his clothes, some data cubes and his real, honest-to-gosh, bound, paper, copy of Tarzan Lord of the Jungle. The family had furniture and other stuff, but the company had that stored for them. Maybe they'd get some of it out for the apartment. Maybe not. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

It was going to be a long flight to Bowan. It was a sub-orbital hop but once you've seen one you've seen 'em all. So Josh lay in the back seat, his foot propped up on a bag of clothes, his head on a pillow, closed his eyes and started reading.

They left early, stopping for breakfast at a greasy spoon in Samoa and lunch on the outskirts of Bowan. It was a McFries outlet on the forty-seventh floor of one of the outer megascrapers. From the window, Josh could see way off in the distance some hills. They were green. He took one more look at them and bit into his McWhopper.

The earliest memory he had of his dad was him bringing home McWhoppers. It was a big deal, then. He didn't know why; they ate them all the time these days. That had been in Durban. Durban had been pretty cool, from what he could remember of it. The house had been small and old but it was surrounded by trees and he could still hear the screams of the monkeys sometimes when he thought hard. And most of his brothers and sisters were still home so they'd been crowded. But it was in the country and it was near a river. And they had a pool. His earliest conscious memory was of nearly drowning in the pool. Mom and Dad always had a pool, a lake, a river, somewhere to swim. They might move a lot, but they always got to swim.

There had been a big party when they moved to Bowan; everybody was really happy. He didn't know why, he'd liked Durban. And he'd gotten to like Bowan even if it was different, too. Bowan was cold, most of the time, it seemed to him. And they'd moved into a really small apartment in the megascraper. But the complex had a pool. He'd nearly drowned in that one, too, when Cho had been wrestling with a big null-grav player from school and he'd jumped in to "save" the brother that was ten years older than he was. The next thing Josh could remember was being stuck under the struggling bodies and not being able to get to the surface.

But this time there wouldn't even be Cho to play with, or at least nag. Cho was married. He lived in Bowan, though, so maybe they'd get together.

Josh glanced out of his eye as a pretty girl sat down across from them. She was wearing the current fashion which was, as his dad put it one time, "two bangles and a feather." The girl caught him looking and Josh turned away and took another bite out of the burger, blushing.

He'd never been one of those boys who didn't like girls. He could remember in Durban when he was, maybe, five, getting married to some girl. Just play-acting but they'd been really serious about the vows. A couple of days later she'd wanted a divorce and he'd had to go get the term "annulment" explained to him. He still didn't get it.

But getting the girl was what it was all about. He knew that from his graphnovs. The good guy got the girl and the bad guy didn't, that's how you could tell the difference. Oh, the bad guy might have some girl hanging around, but he was always after the good guy's girl. Josh wanted to have a girl. One that wore "two bangles and a feather." And he'd save her from evil Jootans by sneaking into their secret base…

"Time to leave," his dad said.

[2: Durance Vile]

This was just wrong.

Josh looked out the plastic-crystal windows and sighed. It was pouring down rain and it looked cold. Not that it would matter because he'd probably never go outside again in his whole life.

The apartment was fine, but it was small and seemed dark after living for three years in the tropics. And the complex didn't have a pool. Oh, the megascraper had two, but they weren't members of those. So he was left to sit in the apartment all day and read or tool or meme. And with the meme restrictions his parents had put on his plant, he could basically talk to Sati the Clown fans or nothing. And what he considered appropriate for Sati the clown, a Jootan wouldn't do to an Adoo.

And today was the first day of school. He hated school but "first days," especially when you were already two weeks into the school year and all the kids had broken up into cliques already, were the worst.

Worse and worse and WORSE Mom was walking him to school.

"Time to go, Josh," his mom said from the door.

"I'm sick," Josh said, coughing unconvincingly.

His mother sighed. "Come on, Josh."

"Really, really sick," Josh said, slouching towards the door. He coughed again and tried to hack up a gob like Cho could do. No dice.

They walked down the corridor and to the bounce tube then took a slideway to the November quadrant. As they got closer there were more kids, none of them being led to school by their mom, heading for the big double doors.

Josh kicked his heels and watched the other kids as his mom checked him in and uploaded his records.

"Welcome to the Mary Smith Primary School, Josh," the lady behind the counter said.

"Hi," Josh said after a prod from his mother.

"He just takes a while to settle in," his mom said.

"He's certainly been in a lot of schools," the woman replied, frowning at the records. "And there's a six month break . . ."

"I was homeschooling, then," his mom said. "He's met all the standard test requirements," she added, nervously.

"Yes," the woman said, still frowning. "I hope, though, that he can keep up. We have a very active academic program, one of the highest rated in Bowan. He may have . . . problems."

"He's very bright," his mother said in that hard tone she took when somebody was being unusually stupid. "Just log him in. He'll do fine."

"Very well," the woman replied, blinking her eyes. "He's in Mrs. Datlow's homeroom. Room 17395."

Josh closed his eyes for a moment and downloaded a map of the building along with the directions to the class. He was just stepping out to head there when his mother took his hand.

"Mom," he whined, terrified of the aching embarrassment of having his mother lead him to the class by hand. "I can find it on my own. Look, it's down this corridor, take a left, take the second bounce tube, turn right out of the bounce tube . . ."

"Come on, Josh," his mother said, dragging him along.

Josh slumped into the hopeless slouch of an Adoo being taken to the Jootan salt mines and followed along.

****

It barely took him two classes to find his niche. Complete and total loser.

"Your assignment for today, class," the teacher said, smiling brilliantly as she passed out pieces of lined plascrip, "is to write a story about what you did on your summer holiday."

Josh looked at the plascrip in disbelief and then picked up the pencil. He hadn't actually written anything since kindergarten! What was this, the Outer Limits?

He looked at the teacher and pinged her. When she didn't reply he hesitantly raised his hand.

"Yes, Josh?" the woman asked, smiling.

"You want me . . . you want me to write?" he asked, holding up the pencil hesitantly.

"Yes, Josh," the woman replied, still smiling.

"Bu . . . but . . ." he looked into the corner of the room and pointed. "There's a printer."

"I know, Josh," the teacher said, speaking to him as if he were an idiot. "But you have to write it."

"I can meme it in about ten seconds," Josh said, composing the first sentence and pinging her again.

"Josh," the woman said, gently but with a tone of anger. "Everyone doesn't have implants. You have to write it."

"They don't?" he said, horrified. He sent a general ping and the woman shook her head.

"Josh! Do not broadcast! It's very rude!"

"But . . ."

"Josh just write the assignment!" the teacher said, angrily.

Josh bowed his head and picked up the pencil like a dagger, pressing it into the plascrip and trying not to tear it.

W . . . H . . . A . . . T--

****

Math wasn't much better.

"Miss Rodinson?" Josh said, raising his hand after repeated pinging didn't work.

"Yes, Josh?" the woman said, smiling.

"That's wrong," Josh said. "It's a nested set. Marsupials are a subset of mammals which are in turn a subset of animals." He got sent a command to the projector and rearranged the teacher's careful work, which she had been laboriously inputting with a keyboard and stylus, showing the nested set. "It's like that. Or in Leet . . ."

"Josh," the woman said, angrily. "Do not rearrange the board. Understand?"

"Yes, but it's wrong," he insisted. "All marsupials are mammals. All mammals are animals. Ergo supper."

"Josh, the way that I had it was right," Miss Rodinson said, frantically tapping at the input board. "Drat, I didn't save."

"It was like this," Josh said, rearranging the projection. "But that's wrong!"

"It's right, Josh!" the woman argued.

"No it's not," Josh said, mulishly.

"Josh, access the answers at the end of the assignment. The even numbered ones have answers. It's in the book."

Josh accessed the pad in the desk through his plant and then frowned.

"It's still wrong," he said. "I don't care what the book says . . ."

****

Then there was lunch.

"What did you bring me to eat, dweeb?" the bully said, snatching the bag out of Josh's hand. "Think you're smart. What do smart kids eat?"

"Ham sandwich," Josh sighed. "Apple. Bulb of choco-cola. Frits."

"Guess I'll be eating well," the kid smirked at him, vanishing into the crowd.

"Yeah," Josh said, getting in line to buy lunch. He'd learned to keep some money the first few days of school. 'Til kids figured out not to steal his lunches. "And I'll be eating near the teachers. Really near the teachers."

He was just finishing his jello when he heard the howl at the other end of the cavernous room.

****

But, that of course, leads to . . . recess.

"What was in that sandwich?" the kid said, panting as he smacked Josh again.

"Ow! I dunno! My mother made it!" Fighting wasn't going to do any good. The idiot had shared the sandwich with friends.

"You're lying!" the kid said, kicking him in the side.

"Ow!" he said, covering his head with both hands. "Okay, okay! It was habanero sauce . . ."

****

"Miz Parker . . ." the assistant principal said.

"Mrs.," Josh's mom replied. "Not Miz. Not Miss. Mrs."

"Mrs. Parker," the woman continued, "we have been getting a number of complaints about Josh. While he is . . . quite bright, he has shown some . . . antisocial tendencies. Specifically, he has been arguing with teachers . . ."

"Subsets?" Jala said, smiling tightly. "He took that in second grade in Papua. If you have any knowledge of them and access the question and answer you'll find that they are wrong. I've got a PhD in mathematics, I got it when I was sixteen, by the way, Miz Chaberk and I can tell you that in my professional opinion the person who made up your textbook shouldn't be allowed a job as a window washer."

"Then there is the problem of his lack of basic skills," the woman continued, firmly.

"Writing?" Jala said, amazed. "You consider writing by hand to be a basic skill? What next? Driving? Long division? Quantum mechanics?"

"Writing is a basic skill, Mrs. Parker," the woman said, angrily.

"For whom?" Jala cried. "In every other school district that Josh has attended, meming was considered 'writing,'" she continued, speaking slowly and carefully as if to a complete moron. "You can't get a job in a McWhopper franchise without the ability to at least handle a trace set. There is not a job on Terra that requires the skill of writing. If you give me a pencil and some time I might be able to trace out my name. Can you write?"

"And he was found defacing the anti-bullying posters," the woman continued, somewhat desperately.

"Maybe that's because he's come home three days this week with bruises and torn clothes!" Jala snapped.

"We have a very strict anti-bullying policy . . ."

"MAYBE YOU SHOULD TELL THAT TO YOUR STUDENTS!"

****

"Josh," his mom said as he walked in from school. "Sit down."

"Yes, Mother," Josh said, sighing theatrically. He sat across from her and leaned forward, avoiding the cushion of the float chair and examining his sneakers.

"I was called to your school today, to talk to your principal," Jala said. "Did you know that?"

"Yes, Mother," Josh said, apparently fascinated by the sight of his toes.

"I know it takes a little time to settle in," Jala said, "but you seem to be having more problems here than in Papua."

"That's because they're stupid!" Josh said. "They're just stupid! All of 'em."

"They're not stupid, Josh," his mother said. "They're just . . . it's a special kind of . . . well it's what they call 'parochialism' that you get in major cities. And poor quality education, yes. Things are too large so it's just easier to work for the least common denominator."

"Okay," Josh said, having no clue what his mother was talking about.

"I'm . . . if we stay here long I'll probably try to get you in a private school," Jala continued.

"If?" Josh said, picking up on the word that seemed most important in the conversation.

"Oh, we should be staying here for a while," Jala said, smiling.

"Here, here?" Josh asked. "In the apartment?"

"Yes, Josh," Jala replied. "Here, here."

"Oh."

Josh was working on swear words. He knew some but he also knew better than to say them to his mother.

****

School went on as school always did. The bullies stopped taking his lunches, since they never knew what they were going to be laced with. The transition period was . . . tough. He ended up having to both bring a lunch and buy one a couple of times. He had a real aversion to habanero and an even worse aversion to uncooked oyster sauce. He stopped getting beat up so much, but that wasn't the same as making friends. He didn't. Usually he'd find at least one person to hang out with, but not in this school.

The school was in a state of societal flux; even Josh could tell that. Most of the kids were from the local area and tended to be the children of up-scale urban professionals. But a solid core had been transferred from an adjoining scraper, one that had more than its share of low-pay, semiskilled workers and their children. Josh couldn't make friends among the kids like "him" because they had all been going to school together for years and had closed ranks in protection against the "new" kids. Josh, by default, was considered a "new" kid but the children of the relative "poor" had little or no use for some snotty brain. Except as a punching bag.

He figured this out after about a week and quit trying. Most of the bullying came from the low-class kids so he avoided them as much as possible. It was a tightrope every day of school and it was wearing him to a frazzle. No friends in a school where people pretty much ignored you was one thing. No friends in one where you needed them to back you up was hell.

He slouched through the door of the apartment and went to his room, not even bothering to go by the kitchen and to try to cadge a snack. He had another stupid writing assignment due in the morning and it was driving him nuts. He'd figured out that he could use the plant to paint the words better than he could actually write them. He actually had the assignment memed. All he needed was a printer but they cost like a gazillion credits. The only one he could get to was at school and he'd tried the old "I wrote it at home and scanned it dodge" only to be told to go get the original. What he needed was a dog to eat his homework.

He got out the paper he'd been writing on, which had about a hundred tears in it, and frowned. He really, really didn't want to write right now. It hurt his hands and he was embarrassed by the way the words looked. He kicked off his sneakers, which ran to the closet and put themselves away, and then lay down on his float bed, closing his eyes and bringing up a book by some guy called "Dickens." It was really old, almost as old as Tarzan, but it was pretty good.

He opened his eyes when his dad came home and pinged him to say hi. Then he closed them again until he heard the magic word: "project."

He crept to the room iris and put his ear against it. He could hear them talking, faintly.

"Nari . . ."

" Nari? Accompanied?"

"If we want. It's a minimum two year project."

"But . . . Nari? That's . . ."

"In the Peshawn sector, I know. But there are some choices. It's either double my Terra salary or I can take one and a half with benefits. The benefits are housing allowance for spouse, a generous one, and a driver. I can probably swing an education allowance since there are no public schools. There are travel benefits, too. One ticket back to Terra per year for myself and one on the odd six months to Charon Sector or equivalent for myself and family. You get to travel, Jala; I know you've wanted to. And the pay is . . . great."

"The pay would be great and we need it; we're barely keeping up with the Visam Card payments. But . . . Nari . . . That's sort of . . ."

They moved away towards the kitchen and Josh frowned. "Nari." What the hell, or where the hell rather, was Nari?

He carefully accessed the net. His parents had all the usual filters in place but looking a place up wasn't going to get him in trouble. Unless they caught what he was looking up. He never talked about his eavesdropping but when you didn't know from one day to the next where you were going to be sleeping, eavesdropping became a habit.

Nari . . . too many hits. Nari, place. No. Nari . . . geographical . . . Nothing. Where on Terra was Nari? It didn't ring a bell. Nari. Okay, just go through them. Popular singer. Most of those sites were blocked for some reas . . . oh. Woo-hoo!

He spent a little time accessing some sites on the pop-singer Nari Senescenes. Two bangles and a feather, INDEED. My.

But that didn't tell him where they were moving. Or maybe moving. Nari. What did Dad say? Peshawn? Ah. Nari. The Narians. Try that.

Nari, a planet in the Peshawn Sector . . .

WE'RE GOING OFF-PLANET!

Oh, man, but look at those natives . . . UUUUUUG-LEE.

****

"Nari is a planet in the Peshawn Sector," Josh said, tooling the data and throwing up a holopic of the sector then zeroing in on Nari. "It's a hot world which has a green sun. It's mostly arid—that's dry like a desert. The natives are insectoid forms, ten extremities, including two true arms and two false arms, a curved head sort of like a banana . . ."

When he'd told his social studies teacher where they were going she'd asked him to do a presentation for the class. And herself. With as many planets as were known to Terra, she couldn't keep up with all of them. The teacher seemed interested but most of the kids were bored. Until he got to the next bit.

"The Narians reproduce by implanting their eggs in mammalform hosts," he said, showing a video of the implantation. The Narian looked something like a giant wasp and the ovipositor it extended appeared to be about two meters long. "When the eggs hatch, the babies eat their way out of the hosts . . ." And, sure enough, there was a tridee of the young Narian bursting out of the side of a thing that looked like a six legged cow.

"Oh, gross!" "Cool!" "Are you going to get eaten, Josh?"

"Okay, Josh," the teacher said, hurriedly, shutting off the video as the baby Narian extended a labial probe and began ripping chunks out of the shuddering former host. "Thank you very much for that . . . interesting presentation . . ."

"The Toolecks had a war with them about fifty years ago . . ." Josh continued.

"That's enough, Josh."

****

Josh had only been at a spaceport a couple of times before. They'd shuttled up to visit his Nana in one of the orbital nursing homes once and had a vacation on the Terraformed Mars colony. Other than that, all his traveling had been on Terra and most of that by aircar.

But now here he was in the Bowan Spaceport, getting ready to head to Nari via Toolecks. All he knew about Toolecks was that the people there were one of Terra's staunchest allies and they had five eyes. They all spoke Terran with a funny accent, but it was going to be neat.

"You're going to be well over gross cubage, ma'am," the cargo-bot said as the floater transferred their bags to the conveyor.

"Check our record," Jala replied politely, as if the machine was a human. "We're cleared for excess cubic."

Mom had bought him gobs of clothes because she didn't know what she could get in Nari. Not only clothes that fit but some that were too big so he could grow into them. It made a respectable pile of bags.

After they got cleared by the baggage handling system Mom headed for the gates. They passed through the security tunnel then down a bounce tube to the lower levels. That was when Josh started to pick out the aliens.

There was a group of spiderlike Grantin, clustering together as if to avoid the horrible mammalforms around them. There was a tall, spindly Barick, striding through the crowd waiting for the tram. A couple of Toolecks, short and lobsterlike with five eyes extended on eye-stalks, waving their mandibles and clacking away in Tool.

There were more. Harons and Sjoglun and Beetoids and Nalo and . . . too many to count and in all different shapes, sizes and colors. It was just so cool.

Dad joined them as the grav tram arrived. He'd been held up by a ping from his home-office. But they got on the tram together, careful to take the oxy-nitrogen sector one, and headed for the out-terminal.

"Problem?" Jala said as they hung onto the grab bars. There was a stabilization field so those were more for psychological benefit than anything.

"Bank of Heteran wouldn't take the transfer," Steve replied, shrugging. "So we're going to be paid through Bank of Donlon on Tooleck. Not a problem, there's a branch in Heteran and you can access from anywhere on Nari. But you'd better get used to the fact that Nari uses more physcreds than Terra or Tooleck. They've got a local money called the rayel and they mean real money. Sheets with the local ruler's face graved on them."

"How . . . interesting," Jala said, her eyes widening.

"You can carry enough to get around in your pouch," Steve said, shrugging. "And hotels and things in Heteran will take Visam or a Bank of Donlon . . . well it's a piece of plastrip with writing on it called a 'cheque.' You fill in how much money you're paying them and then thumb it. Hand it over to them and it's like doing a trans but you have to keep track of them so you don't overdraw the account. We'll pick some up in Tooleck while we're there and I'll get one of their comps to explain it to you. Bank of Donlon 'cheques' are accepted in some of the strangest places." He paused and grinned. "Welcome to the Outer Limits, honey."

"Hey, Dad?" Josh said. "Can I get some of those rayel?"

"We'll see, squirt," Steve said, rubbing his head. "We'll see. You're going to be in a different part of the ship from us, Josh, you know that?"

"I am?" Josh said, his eyes widening.

"Yes, you're going to be up front," Jala replied.