Changelings

"What's that mean?"

"We say it to mean hello and good-bye," Ronan, now official Petaybean goodwill ambassador, told him.

"Ah, we say 'aloha.' Means a couple of other things too. Slainte. You guys twins?"

"Yeah, we are. You got any brothers or sisters?"

"Ten sistahs, twelve bruthahs. Four sets twins. I had a twin myself but he died when we were born."

"Whew, that's a lot of sibs!" Ronan said.

"Your mum must be tired," Murel said.

"Six sistahs, four bruthahs are half-we got different mamas," he told them.

"Here's our classroom," Murel told him, as if saying good-bye. He reached above her and shoved the door open a little farther.

"Mine too," he said.

As it turned out, the space station school was sort of fun. On Petaybee there were no other kids their own age from the planet. Almost all of the kids in the lower levels were offworlders. Here it was the same, but everyone was in the same boat, or rather, on the same space station. And now Ronan and Murel had journeyed among the stars too, so even though they maybe hadn't seen other worlds like some of the kids had, they had more in common with them than they did with the offworld kids back home.

Also, they weren't the littlest kids here. Many of the others were younger than they were and several were their own age. A couple of them had never been off the space station.

They were friendly too, if a little too curious for comfort sometimes.

"Hey, twins, I heard you brought your pet seals with you," a younger boy named Dewey said.

"Madame built them a pool up at her house, is what my mom said. Can I come and play with them?"

What shall we say? Murel asked.

We can say we had to send the seals home, Ronan suggested.

Yeah, but then if anyone sees us accidentally in seal form we won't have any way to explain it, Murel said. Finally she told Dewey, "You know, the reason we brought them with us, Dewey, is that they're really shy-even around our parents. They hide if they know anybody else is around. They're, uh-"

"They're rescue seals," Ronan said. "They were going to be killed by offworld fur trappers when they were babies. The trappers already killed their families and everything. It was terrible. Our aunt Sinead is the Game Warden and she gave them to us to raise but they never have wanted to be around any other humans, only us."

"Oh," Dewey said. "Well, maybe when you've been here awhile and they get a little older they'll get used to us too, if you have us up to Madame's a lot."

"Yeah, maybe so," Ronan said. But to Murel he said, Like we're going to be away from Petaybee that long.

They had one teacher overall for each age group, and that teacher supervised all the computer classes that made up the bulk of their studies. But since they had several very prominent scientists on board the station, Marmie had talked some of them into teaching classes in their specialties in the school too.

Dr. Freyasdottur, their geography teacher for this class, was also a sociobiologist and an environmental systems engineer, responsible for the weather system on Marmie's level, among other modifications on the space station. She was a sturdy young-looking blond woman with a round face, dancing blue eyes, and large teeth that showed a lot because she smiled often. Her hair was cut short and by the end of the class stuck out in all directions because she often grabbed at it, stuck pencils in it, or pulled at it for emphasis.

She employed a lot of holos as models and teaching tools and hopped enthusiastically around each, pointing out the features of systems full of planets that had worlds within worlds. The holos showed people working in fields blooming with crops or picking fruit from trees, manufacturing parts for electronic equipment, or mining minerals. Each planet had a different skyscape, and after they studied one, Dr. Freyasdottur would zip it back into its star system to show them where it fit in the cosmic scheme of things.

"Now then," she said at the end of class one day, "for your homework, I want you all to design a holo of your own home world. Yes, yes, I know a few of you are station born and bred and have never been dirtside, so you will need to ask your parents for help locating, gathering information about, and depicting their worlds of origin. If they are from one of the older planets, you may place your focus on the country from which they come, its language, if other than Standard, customs as they deviate from those in station life, imports and exports, and contributions to the Federation. If you or your parents come from one of the planets terraformed by Intergal to house the inhabitants of Old Earth and some of the other older worlds, then we'd like to know what life is like there.