Starcrossed

Chapter 11a: Rigel (part 1)

CHAPTER 11 (part 1)

Rigel (RY-jel): an extremely hot, rapidly-burning star

Allister is still on my folks for not making me do more around the house, so I clear the table and start doing the dinner dishes before anyone asks. Anyway, I'd rather do dishes—even by hand—than talk Echtran guidelines. Especially with Allister.

I take an extra couple minutes to wipe down the sink and straighten some stuff on the counter, but finally I run out of excuses not to join my dad, my grandfather and Allister in the living room.

"So are we agreed that it's pointless to try to cover every conceivable situation?" my father is saying. He's the youngest and doesn't hold any kind of leadership position, so he tends to defer to them. Not that he's a wimp. He proved that during the big battle in the cornfield.

"I suppose so." Allister sounds reluctant. He's middle-aged for a Martian, maybe a hundred and fifty, and definitely has control issues. The type who'd rather legislate every detail of people's lives than risk them doing anything "wrong." Meaning, "not his way."

Grandfather agrees with my dad. "Our people have done remarkably well avoiding detection or even suspicion for over five hundred years without canonized regulations. I believe we can trust they will continue to do so. This can simply be a handbook to ease their transition into terran life."

I admire Shim more than anybody I've ever known, though when I was a kid I was so in awe I was practically scared of him. To be honest, he still intimidates me a little, but he probably intimidates most people. He gives off a sort of aura of power, like you might expect from a president or a king or something. Maybe because he's the oldest Martian on Earth—which makes him the oldest person on Earth—at two hundred seventy-eight.

"Should we at least include a list of proscribed technologies?" my dad asks, making notes on his handheld computer. It's just a souped-up tablet, though, not anything Martian. Not like Sean O'Gara's omni.

"I'd prefer to let our people use their own judgment," Grandfather says, "unless you think such a list would be helpful to them?"

Allister's frowning again. "We can't overstate the importance of secrecy, at least for the next few decades. Now that all rational people are agreed we should pursue peaceful integration with Earth culture, we must be careful not to jeopardize that by premature discovery. Any technology likely to be noticed—or abused—should be avoided."

"Of course," Shim agrees. "And some must obviously be banned entirely, such as the Ossian Spheres that Boyne Morven smuggled to Earth."

They all nod, and so do I—emphatically. That vicious thing nearly killed M and my mother last month, not to mention that he'd planned to use it to enslave humans by the thousands. Talk about abuse of technology!

"That goes without saying," Dad says. "Though perhaps we should note it anyway, just to be clear. But what about the gray areas? Most Martian households have at least a few, ah, improvements that would be difficult to explain to the average Duchas. Should we craft any guidelines for those?"

"What our people use in the privacy of their own homes doesn't concern me so much as things they might be tempted to use in more public settings," Allister says. "Not everyone has impeccable judgment, after all." He glances at me.

I totally know what he's thinking. Not only does he hate my relationship with M, he hasn't forgiven any of us for going against his advice when we let all the other Martians on Earth know about her. If he'd had his way, she'd have spent the last two months in that compound in Montana, well away from me. Which would probably mean she and I would both be dead by now, without any help from Faxon's goon squad.

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