Mrs. Stuart snorted. “‘Destiny’! Fiddlesticks!”
“Can you be sure, ma’am?”
“I can be sure of this: my son is not going to the other side of nowhere. In another week he is entering college, which is where he belongs.”
“Is it his education which worries you, ma’am?”
“What? Why, of course. I want him to get a good education. His father set up a trust fund for it; I intend to carry out his wishes.”
“I can put your mind at rest. In addition to an embassy, we will send a cultural mission, a scientific mission, an economics and trade mission, and many specialists, all topflight minds. No single college could hire such an aggregation of talent; even the largest institutions of learning would be hard put to match it. Your son will be taught, not casually but systematically. If he earns a degree, it will be awarded by, uh. . . by the Institute of Outer Sciences.” He smiled. “Does that suit you?”
“Why, I never heard of such a silly arrangement. Anyway, the Institute isn’t a college.”
“It can bestow a degree. Or, if not, we will have its charter amended. But degrees are unimportant, ma’am, the point his that your son will have an unparalleled higher education. I understand that he wishes to study xenic science. Well, not only will his teachers be the finest possible, but also he will live in a new field laboratory of xenology and take part in the research. We know little of the Hroshii; he will labor on the frontiers of science.”
“He’s not going to study xenology.”
“Eh? He told Mr. Greenberg that he meant to.”
“Oh, he has that silly idea but I have no intention of indulging him. He will study some sound profession-the law, probably.”
Mr. Kiku’s brows went up. “Please, Mrs. Stuart,” he said plaintively. “Not that. I am a lawyer-he might wind up where I am.”
She looked at him sharply. He went on, “Will you tell me why you plan to thwart him?”
“But I won’t be. . . No, I see no reason why I should. Mr. Kiku, this discussion is useless.”
“I hope not, ma’am. May I tell a story?” He assumed consent and went on, “These Hroshii are most unlike us. What is commonplace to us is strange to them, and vice versa. All we seem to have in common is that both races are intelligent
“To us they seem unfriendly, so remote that I would despair, were it not for one thing. Can you guess what that is?”
“What? No, I can’t”
“Your son and Lummox. They prove that the potential is there if we will only dig for it. But I digress. More than a hundred years ago a young Hroshia encountered a friendly stranger, went off with him. You know our-half of that story. Let me tell you their side, as I have learned it with the help of an interpreter and our xenologists. This little Hroshia was important to them; they wanted her back very badly. Their patterns are not ours; they interweave six distinct sorts of a genetic scheme we will be a long time understanding.
“This little Hroshia had a role to play, a part planned more than two thousand years ago, around the time of Christ. And her part was a necessary link in a larger planning, a shaping of the race that has been going on, I am told, for thirty-eight thousand of our years. Can you grasp that, Mrs. Stuart? I find it difficult. A plan running back to when Cro-Magnon man was disputing with Neanderthals for the prize of a planet. . . but perhaps my trouble lies in the fact that we are ourselves the shortest-lived intelligent race we have yet found.
“What would we do if a child was missing for more than a century? No need to discuss it; it in no way resembles what the Hroshii did. They were not too worried about her welfare; they did not think of her as dead. . . but merely misplaced. They do not die easily. They do not even starve to death. Uh, perhaps you have heard of flatworrns? Euplanaria?”