Njagi blusters.  “I don’t see the harm –”

Oh, Jesus.  “You don’t see the harm in doing exactly the opposite of what I specifically requested?”

“It’s boring here,” Njagi says, his face flushing darker.  One of the children, Smamina, dashes off toward the compound, but the rest just watch the two of them attentively like they’re the best entertainment around.  “The elders won’t show me those cabbages with the hearts in them, or that seaweed I’m not supposed to know about.”

“Not this again –”

“And it’s been months of you asking Ayal about his dreams and shit –”

“You mean months of me doing my job.”

“Don’t even start with me. I can’t do my job because we don’t have access to botanical samples and asking leading questions is ‘telling them about Earth culture’ –”

“I told you I’d find a way to –”

“And, and!  Santos is off killing rhinos or whatever, and these kids are smart, Peter, they are so smart, and they don’t even realize what they can do.  Do you know Smamina did Calculus the other day?”

Soliday feels himself go completely still.  “You’re teaching these children Calculus?” he asks.  Njagi’s eyes go wide.  He says again, very slowly, “You’re teaching them Old Earth games.  And Calculus.”

As if on cue, their audience perks up.  “I am going on a picnic,” one of them chirps helpfully, “and I am bringing knives.”

Another says, “I am bringing groflen paste.”

A small boy to Njagi’s left says, “I am bringing guests,” and sticks his chin out when the others stare at him.

Njagi puts a hand over his face.  “They’re not even doing it right,” he says, muffled.  “Soliday — Peter, listen to them.  This isn’t contaminating their culture any more than us even being here.”

“He’s right,” one of the other children hisses.  “We’re supposed to go alphabetically.  Mr Njagi, will you tell us the alphabet again?”

Njagi gives them one horrified look and says, “I’ll just, I’m going to,” and scrambles to his feet and away before Soliday can even start to breathe again.

The first child to speak, Krinfield or something, Krinspen, comes over to Soliday and places a hand on his arm comfortingly.  “Will you two fight to the death now?” she asks.  Looking past her, Soliday can see a Smamina walking over from the compound and pulling Ayal by the hand, with other adults following after them.  Behind them comes Santos, tall and straight, with that set of her shoulders that says she’ll be very irritated if they don’t stop fucking up right now.  ”Father said you were not warriors, but I did not believe him.”

And oh Jesus, none of this is going right at all.

—

If Soliday were going to tell anyone on Sifla about Earth, he wouldn’t give them games and mathematics.  He’d give them the warm, quiet hallways of the Lieutenant Historian Archives, and the perfect precise clarity of their cataloguing system.

He’d give all the music the Lieutenant Historians have collected in the years since the Reformation: klezmer and Nony wedding chants, throat-singing and the Intergalactic Top 2500.

He’d give the memory of the first time he heard Vladimir Ashkenazy play Debussy’s Images, Book 1, back when he was a student: the way he sat in his study carrel with his eyes closed against the blue light of the Archives, hunched in on himself much as possible to keep the sound inside, and the notes swirling around like a snowstorm, with McCabe smiling into his neck and whispering, “See?  See what we get to have here?” every time he shuddered at the beauty of it, every time he nearly wept.

Becky laughed.  She couldn’t help it.  And then she surprised the hell out of herself by buying him a sandwich and teaching him how to do the business properly.

A girl from the group, one he hadn’t met before, wandered over to where he was standing.  “It never ends,” she said.

“Welcome to the Holy Land,” Idan told her, and felt the warmth of it when she laughed.

“I’m Rebecca,” she said.  “Are you Sephardic or Ashkenazi?”

“Uh.”  Idan held his arms out helplessly.  “Sure,” he said.  “Anything.”

She smiled and shrugged.  “Well, that’s what you’re here for,” she said.  Looking at her, he thought maybe coming here wasn’t a stupid idea after all.

The kids around them started moving.  When he turned and looked, the guide was leading them through the gate.  “Come on,” he said, “We’re walking again.”

“Thank fuck,” Rebecca said.  Idan grinned at her.  Not a stupid idea at all.

They walked through the gate together, and the inner city of Jarusalem opened like a fern.  Hills and buildings and traffic and noise and people, and far away the golden shine of the Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall underneath it.  Kids from Idan’s group laughed and shoved at each other, racing down the hill.  Their guide stopped them at a small shop near the bottom.  “Everybody get some water,” she said.  “Even if you think you don’t need it.  Even if you don’t want to carry it.  I don’t want anyone getting sick on this trip from dehydration.”  But half the kids stayed outside anyway, just shuffling around, and Idan stayed outside with them.

Just as they started off again, Rebecca leaned over, pointing to a young boy wrestling mightily with a goat, and said, “You see that boy over there?”

Idan shrugged.  He wasn’t going to go help the kid out, if that was what she meant.

“He’s an Arab.”  Idan shrugged again, and she frowned.  “The man in the shop back there was Arab, too.  That’s why I didn’t buy any water.”

“What?”  Idan shook his head.  “Why?”

“Everybody knows the Arab merchants in Jerusalem fund the terrorist attacks.  That’s how they get all the money for their bombs.”  She said this like she’d tell him she was born in California, or like her sister was five years old; straight and simple.  Idan turned to look at the boy with the goat, but he was gone up the road already, back toward the old wall.

Idan said, “I’ll be right back,” and left Rebecca on the cobbled road, running back toward the little shop and ducking inside.  It was close and dark, and filled with strange, beautiful smells, with a glass-front fridge full of Coke and water bottles near the back.

He stopped just inside the door, breathing hard, thinking — he didn’t know what. He wanted to tell the old Arab man by the Coke fridge about his Argentinian Jewish father, who’d died before he could remember, and about the mystery of blood and skin that Idan had been left with.  He wanted to say, “I don’t believe you would ever do that.”  He wanted to go home.

Idan got two waters and a Coke, all the defiance he had money for, and when he walked outside the rest of his group had turned a corner and were completely out of sight.

They’d been nice enough to schedule it for lunch time. Charlotte ate her sandwich on the uptown C train and brushed the crumbs off her stiff, borrowed suit, and walked inside to wait.  It took them fifteen minutes to come for her.

The receptionist was a sweet-looking, grandfatherly man.  He saw her sitting twiddling her thumbs, and pointed out the windows to the brownstones across the way.  “See that one?” he asked.  “You’d never guess it was a brothel.”

“I — it’s a what?” Charlotte said.

“Yeah, the police come around sometimes during business hours and bust everybody.  Hookers walking around in bathrobes and handcuffs.  It’s a sight.”

“Well, ah.” Charlotte looked at the building he had pointed to.  It looked just the same as all the others — a little tumbledown, a little cold.

 
AHAHAHAHA THAT’S AS FAR AS I GOT.

Walter loved those glasses, which were a gift from his Della, small and sleek with red lenses, so he said comfortably, “You got good taste.”

The girl grinned at him, her eyes squinting up to nothing, and said, “Thank you!” and then shuffled in before the old woman behind her could get impatient, and then they were off down the street.

At the stoplight, Walter looked in his rearview and saw the top of the girl’s head, midway down the aisle and bent over a book. She reminded him of Jeanine — they were the same age, and she read like Jeanine, her whole body curved around the book, and maybe Jeanine was out in Cambridge right now, complimenting her bus driver as he took her to her sophomore classes. Jeanine called them almost every night, to talk about how cold it was and the people she had met, how much she missed them. And the other day she’d told Della that she maybe wanted to stay at school for Thanksgiving — she had a project due, there was a friend that she could stay with, she’d come back next year — and Walter wanted to talk her out of it but Della told him hush. He wondered if Jeanine’s bus driver had a daughter, and if they ever talked. Then the car behind him honked quickly, twice, and he saw that the light was green and jerked into motion.

The girl came all the way up to the front to thank him when he got to her stop, creating a bottleneck as people tried to clamber up the stairs and she skipped down them. He watched until she had turned the corner and disappeared.

That night, he and Della sat by the phone when Jeanine called, and she told him about study groups and her introductory physics class, and the food she’d made in the dining hall kitchen from Walter’s recipe, and how she was thinking of maybe joining Alpha Kappa Alpha. Walter wanted to tell her about the girl on the bus, but he didn’t know why or what he would even say, so he just told her that he loved her and gave the phone to Della.