Chapter Eight
I needed to see for myself what the state of Dorian’s animal menagerie really was. So after my boring lunch, I loaded Chameleon into his travel cage and headed off to Susu and Babu’s place.
Home never stops looking beautiful. I love how I can look up from our courtyard and see Susu and Babu’s place. Yeah, it’s a hike if you can’t just use one of the council vehicles that travel off-track, but usually we can. I waited a couple minutes at the end of New Main West to see if I could get an unlocked AnyUser car. I needed one that had had the “limited to on-rail use only” option left turned off by a grown-up.
The same locked vehicle returned in response to my summoning button press for the first three times. On the fourth one, I got an occupied vehicle: a lovely bright pink on-or-off track car.
Ms. Zeegee laughed when I sheepishly explained what I’d been trying to do. She swore that she would have helped me, but she was out on a dinner run for the Station Council. My dad and Mr. Petrie-Xi would have their food get cold if she waited. Plus Mr. Leibe and Mrs. Pixie might be stopping in later, so she had to make a second stop for a soup thermos and a sandwich tray to have ready if the full Council decided to show.
I would walk. I’d get my muscle tone back faster that way anyhow.
So, yeah, all the fuss about making sure that Ahini de Zuri-Grumft got called Ms. Zeegee and not Ahini or even Ms. Ahini when my grandparents are Susu and Babu seems odd to kids like Omaara or Xavier. They don’t get it for the same reason. They aren’t originally from Chawla.
Susu means grandma.
Babu means grandpa.
They might not even mean grandpa and grandma in the same language. I’ve never really studied old Earth languages. I haven’t had time to learn everything. Electronics, math, spatial geometry, and general engineering seem a lot more necessary.
People are lucky that the first- and second-generation Saturnians even continued the practice of learning to read and write non-numerical text. For a while there, it seemed like literacy might become an oddball hobby instead of something 99+% of adults did.
They say text-to-speech and speech-to-text are so default on some continents back on Earth that street signs are only repainted when the electronic opticals can’t read them instead of when human eyes can’t. But maybe that’s because of something else…
Well, never mind, I don’t actually know any of that for certain either.
I’m interested, don’t get me wrong, but there just isn’t time!
Susu answered the door. She’s six foot and one-half inch when she stands up perfectly straight, which is tall even for a Sadou.
But she doesn’t stand up that much anymore. Today, for instance, she was bent almost double with a screwdriver. The machine holding the door open beeped insistently at me. I stepped inside and the more-wheels-than-brain little machine slammed the door behind me.
“Gotta adjust that one,” Babu called out from his easy chair.
Susu was, like always, fiddling with something. This time it was her custom-built rollator. It has a fold-down seat, a motor, and a really ingenious counter-balance system that keeps it from it tipping over even when she off-roads with it.
She turned up her face with a brilliant grin just for me. “Heya, Caly!” She has a lot of lines, but they are smile lines, and she spends most of her time on her work couch with RV (Remote View) goggles covering her piercing gray eyes while the graceful movements of her still strong arms and legs control remote tools in her workshop out-hull.
Babu had a potted plant in front of him, being held up by one of Susu’s machines. I couldn’t see him through the lumbering bot, which would have pleased him. He always claimed to be “just not that big” at “five foot thirteen inches.” He was shorter than average for an adult male Sadou. In all the formal photos, he’d get Susu to put on high heels and he’d slouch a bit with a giant grin as he tried to get lower and lower while encouraging Susu to stand on tiptoes.
I guess guys used to hate being shorter than women, or something? I don’t know. It’s grown-up humor.
With all the effort folks like the Rockworths spend now on being more compact to take up less space and mass on spacecraft, it doesn’t make sense, but apparently on a planet, people feel differently about height.
And yes, both grandparents were Sadou descendants. The original clan back on Earth before the move to Saturn wasn’t exactly tiny when you include all the second and third cousins of Pascaline Herself who happily affiliated themselves once it became clear that the family fortunes were on the rise.
Mom, whose parents have died, but who has two sisters and a brother all with kids over on Phoebe, is descended from Sadou Benoit, who was uncle to both Pascaline and That Maurie. Dad’s Sadou connections (through Susu and Babu) are more distant, but they include a maternal link to the sister of Commander Jules of the First Crew. My brothers Jules and Dorian have a direct line descent from Commander Jules.
The different Sadou descendancy lines are why both Mom and Dad absolutely need to be at Phoebe for the argument about what’s best for the other disaster survivors. Bringing Jules and Dorian along and everyone seeing that, occasional panic attacks included, they are doing okay, should help too. If nothing else, Jules and Dorian want to see their old friends and how they’ve recovered.
As everyone in the Rings knows, Pascaline and Adamou were really old when our RSC Chawla was finally launched, but they hadn’t actually had any children by the regular way. So the only descendants they have are from the embryos frozen before the First Crew launched.
Most of their Sadou cousins had moved to one of cities on Earth’s Moon by then. From reading between the lines (because family history is too important to not study even as a kid), there must have been some pretty big struggles between various family members. Adamou and Pascaline arranged for voting on the future Saturn stations and ships to be something only people who were physically present could do and for votes to be weighted based on shares. More shares meant more votes. That’s all the stuff in the Pascaline-Adamou Compact. Everyone on the First Crew got a pretty large share, but the biggest portion was to go to Pascaline and Adamou who provided most of the funding. They must’ve been good at understanding how groups of people under pressure far away would interact. That a generation or two later the wealthier ones might be tempted to move to more comfortable places away from where the actual work was being done, because the current system is still strongly aligned with what they first set up.
Mom, being a direct descendant of Benoit Sadou, meant a very powerful voting block. That’d be nothing compared to a Pascaline descendant block, but all those shares are non-voting shares right now since there’s not a legal heir. There’s a sole surviving Reuben Sadou heir over on Daphnis Station who was born from one of the other frozen embryos. His guardian has a lot of power now since he’s never going to manage an adulthood test. People don’t talk clearly about him in front of me, but it’s clear that he’s not very smart. Most of us born from the First Crew’s frozen embryos inherit a single voting share, because that’s who the vast majority of us are: descendants of regular people from the First Crew. Not from the richest couple in cislunar space who funded the flight.
I’m just lucky to be being raised by Sadou parents, but genetically, everyone can tell that I don’t look very much like my parents. Whoever my real parents were, there was some West African, but there was also at least a bit of Chinese-Asian and who knows what else.
I’m not entirely sure what exactly an Earther with only ancestry from one continent looks like, but all Sadous who live on Chawla are darker than me. Most Sadous are pretty dark with hair curly enough to make dreadlocks and way too tall for optimal small spacecraft work. Mom is a bit shorter than Sadou average. Dad is even taller than typical.
Nobody else in the Sadous that I’d ever heard of had straighter hair, lighter skin, and was shorter than Sadou average without it being the case that they were actually adopted into the family.
Babu has always reminded me of a giant teddy bear. He’s frequently on all fours next to a plant checking soil moisture and peering at buds and leaf edges to see if there are any early hints that the illumination level or fertilization needs an adjustment. At his age, he often says, it’s not the bending down that’s hard, it’s the getting up. But of course Susu has his back. He’s got a stander upper device on his motor chair that helps him keep balance and do what he wants.
“So, uh, Babu?”
“Huh?” He was focused on the plants.
They were at the green little speck stage before even putting out a first leaf, so they could’ve been anything, but the side of the container read “parsley” in red which was crossed out in blue, “radishes” in blue and crossed out in blue, “parley” with a little caret adding the “s” but x-ed out in red, and then “African violets” was written last.
I’d seen violets grown from a leaf, but not from seed, so I suspected that he just hadn’t gotten around to crossing out the label and rewriting it.
“Babu?”
“What, kid?” He continued with his mist sprayer, not looking up at me.
“How are Dorian’s pets doing. I mean, really?”
“Huh?”
He poked a finger in the soil and sprayed some more.
Susu made a “psst” noise and beckoned me over.
I helped her stand. She drove her rollator over to the alcove by the kitchen and waved her hand at the piles of empty pet cages.
“Our Brasco got in here and clawed at everything smaller than him. Your Babu felt so awful when I told him. They weren’t all eaten, but we took them to that veterinary quack Fluckey. The man euthanized every last one. Didn’t care one bit that they were Dorian’s.” She shook her fist.
“Um, it’s not like they were pets from their ship,” I said.
“Of course, they weren’t from that ship. Those were first to go when everyone realized there wasn’t enough oxygen for everybody to live long enough for rescue. Do you think I’ve got sunsetters?”
“No, of course not, Susu,” I protested. “I’m just surprised that Papi Fluckey would do that. I mean, he’s never liked people, but they were animals.”
“Wasn’t Papi. It was that grandson of his! He was mad about having to retrieve Ol’ Papi from Sunsetters Villa, and now it’s letter of the law for everything.”
I was really glad Roro Fluckey hadn’t euthanized Chameleon when I’d taken the creature in for his post flight checkup. Maybe Roro had been feeling guilty about the others? For Dorian’s sake, I needed to protect whoever remained of the family pets.
“What about the cats?” I didn’t see any animals about the place but…
“We have Brasco,” Susu said. “He’s enough cat for us.”
Just then Stripey Cat and Orange Cat sauntered across the front garden. Brasco chose that moment to leap from the front guava tree, land a little too hard, and turn and walk away as if trying to show that he’d meant to do that.
Susu looked confused. “I guess Brasco made some friends?”
I bit my lip and avoided saying anything about sunsetters disease. She couldn’t really have forgotten. “Dorian’s cats,” I said, waiting for her to complete some joke.
Susu looked at me in confusion for a moment.
Brasco chose that opportunity to take a turn twining through my legs and then made a leap with claws extended for Chameleon.
I yanked the cage up out of reach and cradled it against my body hoping the sudden motion hadn’t hurt the little creature more than Brasco’s claws would have.
“What catnip do you have in there?” Susu asked with a laugh.
“Dorian’s Chameleon. He sent it with me on the trip out. As my canary bird. Thanks for letting me use your Ladybug,” I added too late. “I, um, sort of, had a crash.”
Susu’s eyes went wide but she looked me up and down and her face stretched into a giant mischievous grin. “Don’t you worry about mere metal, kid. Looks like you walked away just fine. It was a junker pod anyway. We’ll rebuild her better than she ever was. What are we on now anyway? Ladybug 214? Ladybug 1,014?”
Thank God for Susu. She wasn’t mad. “The oxygen levels got a little tight there in the end, but I didn’t even have to use my oxidizer. Good old Jules stashed extra tanks upon extra tanks in my emergency life support locker there when I wasn’t looking.”
“Those boys,” Susu laughed. “Well, there’s worse reactions to that sort of thing. Glad they still go out-hull.”
We talked a bit about what larger refurbishing might be done to Ladybug for her next iteration, which would actually be number 17, but Susu’d been clearly joking about the other total rebuild numbers. She hadn’t forgotten the last several years of major remodels to the good old pod.
Still, I went home that night certain that it wouldn’t be safe to leave Chameleon in Susu and Babu’s care. I made sure the automated cat feeders had been multiplied for the new cats and that the same was true for the litterboxes. They were.
Babu confirmed that the mini goat and the turtle had been rehomed with other stationers, so it was only the cats who were at Casa Sadou. I borrowed some things from the grandkids’ toy chest and headed back home.