“They’re not bodyguards, they’re companions,” Jane said. “Zo? is our adopted daughter. Her biological father is Charles Boutin.” This got a raised eyebrow from Rybicki; he was of sufficiently advanced rank to know about Boutin. “The Obin revere Boutin, but he’s dead. They have a desire to know his daughter, so they sent these two to be with her.”
“And this doesn’t bother her,” Rybicki said.
“She grew up with Obin as nannies and protectors,” Jane said. “She’s comfortable with them.”
“And it doesn’t bother you,” Rybicki said.
“They watch and protect Zo?,” I said. “They help out around here. And their presence with us is a part of the treaty the Colonial Union has with the Obin. Having them here seems like a small price to pay for having them on our side.”
“That’s true enough,” Rybicki said, and stood up. “Listen, Major. I have a proposition for you.” He nodded to Jane. “For both of you, actually.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Rybicki motioned with his head toward the house, in the direction Hickory and Dickory just went. “I’d rather not talk about it where those two might hear, if it’s all the same. Is there some place we can talk privately?”
I glanced over at Jane. She smiled thinly. “I know a place,” she said.
“We’re stopping here?” General Rybicki asked as we pulled up short, halfway across the field.
“You asked if we had someplace where we could talk privately,” I said. “You’ve now got at least five acres of grain between us and the next set of ears, human or Obin. Welcome to privacy, colonial style.”
“What kind of grain is this?” General Rybicki asked, pulling at a stalk.
“It’s sorghum,” Jane said, standing next to me. Babar sat next to Jane and scratched his ear.
“It sounds familiar,” Rybicki said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it before.”
“It’s a staple crop here,” I said. “It’s a good crop because it’s heat and drought tolerant, and it can get pretty hot around here in our summer months. People here use it for a bread called bhakri and for other things.”
“Bhakri,” Rybicki said, and motioned toward town. “These folks are mostly from India, then.”
“Some of them,” I said. “Most of them were born here. This particular village is sixty years old. Most of the active colonization here on Huckleberry is on the Clemens continent now. They opened it up around the same time we arrived.”
“So there’s no tension about the Subcontinental War,” Rybicki said. “With you being American and them being Indian.”
“It doesn’t come up,” I said. “People here are like immigrants everywhere. They think of themselves as Huckleberries first and Indians second. In another generation none of it will matter. And Jane’s not American, anyway. If we’re seen as anything, we’re seen as former soldiers. We were a curiosity when we arrived, but now we’re just John and Jane, with the farm down the road.”
Rybicki looked at the field again. “I’m surprised you farm at all,” he said. “The two of you have real jobs.”
“Farming is a real job,” Jane said. “Most of our neighbors do it. It’s good for us to do it too so we can understand them and what they need from us.”
“I meant no offense,” Rybicki said.
“None taken,” I said, interjecting myself back into the conversation. I motioned to the field. “We’ve got about forty acres here. It’s not a lot—and not enough to take money away from the other farmers—but it’s enough to make the point that the concerns of New Goa are our concerns, too. We’ve worked hard to become New Goans and Huckleberries ourselves.”
General Rybicki nodded and looked at his sorghum stalk. As Zo? had noted, he was green, good-looking and young. Or at least gave the appearance of youth, thanks to the CDF body he still had. He’d look twenty-three years old for as long as he had it, even though his real age was some number over one hundred by now. He looked younger than me, and I was his junior by fifteen years or more. But then, when I left the service, I traded my CDF body for a new, unmodified body based on my original DNA. I looked at least thirty by now. I could live with that.
At the time I had left the CDF, Rybicki had been my superior officer, but he and I went back before that. I met him on my first day of combat, back when he was a lieutenant colonel and I had been a private. He’d offhandedly called me son, as a reference to my youth. I was seventy-five at the time.
This was one of the problems with the Colonial Defense Forces: all that body engineering they do really messes with your age sense. I was in my nineties; Jane, born an adult as part of the CDF Special Forces, was sixteen or so. It can hurt your head if you think about it.
“It’s time you tell us why you’re here, General,” Jane said. Seven years of living with naturally-occuring humans had not blunted her Special Forces-bred way of ramming through social courtesies and getting right to the point.