Oh, Vess and I have much, much to argue about. Your world has so many difficulties to be straightened out, though it is my belief that many of them will submit to simple cures, forcefully applied and diligently monitored. So many little glitches, and yet … as my nootch said of me, long and long ago, we have such hopes for you, dearest Benita, such hopes, dear Chad. Such hopes your people will be another node in the weaving of intelligence among the worlds. When I am arguing with Fluiquosm, when I am listening to ego-wrangles on your TV or in my own Chapter House, when I must consider disorders like those on Assurdo and Quo-Tern, even I sometimes lose sight of what we are truly doing. We are spreading throughout all space and time, weaving a mind to the edges of the galaxy, and in time, in time perhaps throughout the universe. So I remember and keep firmly in my mind when I say, dearest Benita, we have such hopes for you.
Benita—JOURNEY OUT OF TIME
Benita woke in a coffin-like cubby hung on the hull of the ship. She was not conscious of time having passed, not even of a night gone by, as she usually was in the morning when she woke. She’d simply lain down and slept and now was awake, without any sense of later-ness at all. When she lay down, she was still in a state of speechless surprise about where the ship had been all that time. They had walked into the elevator, and suddenly the back of it opened up like a buttonhole and they slipped through, bag and baggage, into the ship. Chiddy explained that it was coexistent with the entire third floor of the building, wall to wall, and that what Benita had thought of as the lower roof was also the outer integument of the ship.
Her first thought was Sasquatch. He had committed indecencies on the ship, time after time. Chiddy didn’t mention it or seem concerned, however, so she decided it was not worth mentioning.
They came aboard, Carlos, thank God, sufficiently impressed to be silent. They drank a glass of something celebratory (and quite likely sedative) with the two Pistach, they lay down in the allocated cubbies. Later, Chiddy told Benita’s cubby to wake her, and also Chad’s, though he let Carlos remain asleep.
Without asking, Benita knew why Chiddy left Carlos asleep. There was no point in waking him any earlier than needful. She started to go through her usual Carlos litany, all the things she might have done differently, the help she might have sought, the influences she might have brought to bear. If there had been more time. If there had been more money. If she had not been so young. In the current surroundings, however, the litany of self-blame lacked force and conviction. Carlos had been a petulant, screaming, stubborn baby, a whiny little boy;a bully in the playground. He had been a slacker at school. He had never been abused, not even by Bert, in any physical sense. He could be charming, when he thought it would get him something, but most of the time he was not. She decided not to play the game with herself anymore. Mother bears didn’t play such games. They knew their cubs had to go. So, let him go.
Once awake, Chad and Benita were told they had arrived near Flibotsia, which they admired through a suddenly opened view screen. Chiddy spoke to someone on the ground, and then the ship went down, light as a bubble.
Chad made himself responsible for the recording equipment. When they stepped outside the ship it was like stepping into a meadow full of huge butterflies that smelled like flowers. Several of them, larger and more brightly colored than the others, approached at once, clustering around Chiddy and Vess to thank them for some event in the past when the Pistach had solved a great problem, or so Benita inferred from the slightly embarrassed expressions on the Pistach faces.
“What was that about?” asked Benita, during a hiatus while the Flibotsi prepared a festive meal to be laid out, picnic style, in the grassy clearing near the ship.