“No,” I said. “Come here a minute. Look.”
Hickory walked over to stand next to me at the window. He looked where I pointed, to two figures in the road in front of our house. Mom and Dad. “She has been out there for some time,” Hickory said. “Major Perry joined her a few minutes ago.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw him walk out.” I heard her walk out, too, about an hour earlier; the squeaking of the springs on the screen door had gotten me out of bed. I hadn’t been sleeping, anyway. Thinking about leaving Huckleberry and colonizing somewhere new was keeping my brain up, and then made me pace around. The idea of leaving was sinking in. It was making me twitchier than I thought it would.
“You know about the new colony?” I asked Hickory.
“We do,” Hickory said. “Lieutenant Sagan informed us earlier this evening. Dickory also filed a request to our government for more information.”
“Why do you call them by their rank?” I asked Hickory. My brain was looking for tangents at the moment, it seemed, and this was a good one. “Mom and Dad. Why don’t you call them ‘Jane’ and ‘John’ like everyone else?”
“It’s not appropriate,” Hickory said. “It’s too familiar.”
“You’ve lived with us for seven years,” I said. “You might be able to risk a little familiarity.”
“If you wish us to call them ‘John’ and ‘Jane,’ then we will do so,” Hickory said.
“Call them what you want,” I said. “I’m just saying that if you want to call them by their first names, you could.”
“We will remember that,” Hickory said. I doubted there would be a change in protocol anytime soon.
“You’ll be coming with us, right?” I asked, changing the subject. “To the new colony.” I hadn’t assumed that Hickory and Dickory would not be joining us, which when I thought about it might not have been a smart assumption.
“Our treaty allows it,” Hickory said. “It will be up to you to decide.”
“Well, of course I want you to come,” I said. “We’d just as soon leave Babar behind than not take you two.”
“I am happy to be in the same category as your dog,” Hickory said.
“I think that came out wrong,” I said.
Hickory held up a hand. “No,” it said. “I know you did not mean to imply Dickory and I are like pets. You meant to imply Babar is part of your household. You would not leave without him.”
“He’s not just part of the household,” I said. “He’s family. Slobbery, sort of dim family. But family. You’re family, too. Weird, alien, occasionally obtrusive family. But family.”
“Thank you, Zo?,” Hickory said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and suddenly felt shy. Conversations with Hickory were going weird places today. “That’s why I asked about you calling my parents by rank, you know. It’s not a usual family thing.”
“If we are truly part of your family, then it is safe to say it’s not a usual family,” Hickory said. “So it would be hard to say what would be usual for us.”
This got a snort from me. “Well, that’s true,” I said. I thought for a moment. “What is your name, Hickory?” I asked.
“Hickory,” it said.
“No, I mean, what was your name before you came to live with us,” I said. “You had to have been named something before I named you Hickory. And Dickory, too, before I named it that.”
“No,” it said. “You forget. Before your biological father, Obin did not have consciousness. We did not have a sense of self, or the need to describe ourselves to ourselves or to others.”
“That would make it hard to do anything with more than two of you,” I said. “Saying ‘hey, you’ only goes so far.”
“We had descriptors, to help us in our work,” Hickory said. “They were not the same as names. When you named Dickory and me, you gave us our true names. We became the first Obin to have names at all.”
“I wish I had known that at the time,” I said, after I took this in. “I would have given you names that weren’t from a nursery rhyme.”
“I like my name,” Hickory said. “It’s popular among other Obin as well. ‘Hickory’ and ‘Dickory’ both.”
“There are other Obin Hickorys,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Hickory said. “Several million, now.”
I had no possible intelligible response to that. I turned my attention back to my parents, who were still standing in the road, entwined.
“They love each other,” Hickory said, following my gaze.
I glanced back at it. “Not really where I was expecting the conversation to go, but okay,” I said.