Chapter 24: Bugger

We checked out the three islands we had earmarked, but they were doing fine.

The local population of plants and animals that were suitable had established themselves, so we left well enough alone. Two of the largest ones that were close together were heavily forested, so we didn’t stay on them long.

We were heading back to the city when something that had been bugging finally came back to my mind. It was something one of the refugee’s had said. “Toby someone mentioned that you were promised magical items when you agreed to get on the ship is that correct?”

“Yes. I don’t know if the items were on the ship or if the Queen was going to make them when we got to where we were going. Mind you that’s a lot of items to make if the thousand of us were supposed to get them.”

“Well, I only really need a box that has a wand and crystal ball in it,” I said.

Toby chuckled, “High-order mage boxes don’t have crystal balls. Only apprentice wizards and full wizards get those.”

“So to make the mage boxes complete I just need a wand,” I mused aloud.

“If any magical items are on the ship, they will be in the treasure room on level six. Only a wizard is supposed to be able to open that room,” Toby told me.

“Well, it looks like I’m going on a treasure hunt, want to come along?” I asked him. I think the huge grin was answer enough. Toby had fitted into my family like he belonged. Kathy was nuts about him, and I’m damn sure the feelings were mutual.

He might not be a shifter, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. Tory said shifters often like to mate with non-shifters to strengthen the gene pool. All of Kathy’s kids to him should be shifters as her genes dominated, and she was a magician.

The fact he was as well would only strengthen the children’s abilities. They were a great combination. Tory did mention it wouldn’t hurt if he took a second shifter as a wife as well. I decided that if they did, that it would be sometime in the future as for now they were pretty happy together.

We had come back a week early since I did feel a bit bad about dumping the guests on the girls. Since the islands were healthy and we had completed the objective of the trip, we had no real reason to stay away. Plus I now had something else I need to do.

We stopped off at a couple of the outposts along the coast on the way back and stocked the ship to capacity with extra stores. I was kinda of flabbergasted just how full our stores where. The zoetics and their androids had been busy. I had to double my estimates.

For some reason, they had also constructed our basic four tower setup within a klick of the structures erected for the outpost. When I asked why they assumed that we had them storing food, so families could move here.

So I dropped a new shield over the town area that covered the outpost and 10km area around them. The zoetics assured me they would remove any of the animals I consider pests from the zone. I told them they could leave the bugs used for pollination purposes and they were happy with this.

So we made it home on a Sunday, a week before the town meeting.

Kathy decided not move out just yet, but she did move Toby in.

To be honest, I had no problem with this. I liked the bloke. It had an interesting effect on the new arrivals. They all knew I had taken Toby with us after I left. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation as to why. They only had to see him with Kathy to see why.

One of the first things I did on the second day we were back was to check on Heidi. She was still in the ship and was slowly coming to terms with her new situation. I asked how she was feeling and she said that she was over the illness and feeling a lot better.

She was down in the dumps, as she honestly didn’t know what to do with herself. I asked her what she used to do at home and she blushed and said not very much. She had servants who did everything for her. She read, painted or played music and went to see her friends.

I asked about her schooling and what subjects she liked. She said she did the usual subjects. She wasn’t expected to become a scholar as she was meant to marry well and help her husband run his home, manage the servants and raise the kids.

Apparently, many of the lower mages and royals tended to towards male-dominated societies since a lot of the true magicians had left. They had blamed the Empresses and the Queens for not keeping them safe. Things had turned topsy-turvy in the last hundred years. Women were not even allowed to be tested for magical abilities in many places.

I asked if she liked kids. She gave me a small smile and said she did. So I took her for a walk. I took her to the top of one of the towers. A group of seven-year-olds were learning how to draw and design dwellings.

All of our kids so far had inherited Tory’s gene and absorbed knowledge at an astounding rate. We spent more time teaching them how to link it all together. “Why does everyone speak that strange language?” Heidi asked as we went upstairs.

“My fault, the man who rescued Torus-16 and awakened Tory, was from a different planet. His country was called Australia, and it’s the language that his people spoke. Torus-16 had a copy of all his files from his ship, and my sisters and I became fascinated with him and the people from Earth as they call their planet. Here,” I said.

I touched her temple, and she closed her eyes. “Okay now try and say something,” I said in Aussie.

She looked at me in wonderment and said, “I understood you.”

I smiled, “And I, you. Now you will at least be able to understand us.”

She smiled the first real smile I’d seen on her face. “Thank you, I shall practice your language as I’m sure there will be things I say wrong.”

I chuckled, “Don’t worry the kids will help you out. They switch between both languages. Even the kids that were born naturally seem to pick up both languages from the start. Did anyone explain to you about our abilities to retain knowledge?”

“Yes, a young girl called Brandy said that I wasn’t to be scared if they seemed to know a lot, as they were still learning how to use the knowledge they had and that was no different to any other human.”

“That’s a good way of explaining things. This group have the basic knowledge of building design. They know about load bearing weight, the tensile strength, heat absorption and radiation and such, of lots of different materials and even what the textures and colours of these materials look like.”

I handed her a pair of spare glasses. “I designed these to help the naturally born kids download knowledge. You can vary the rate to suit yourself. Keep them, I’d like to know if your people can use them to some extent as well,” I told her.

“These kids know the dynamics of how to put it all together to build something that will look nice and is functional. However, it’s one thing to know how two bits of wood should be cut to fit together but doing it, is something you can only learn by doing.”

“And you teach the doing,” she said as she watched the children with fascination.

“Yep, and they have a lot of fun learning. It isn’t knowledge that can be stored in a database because we all seem to do things a little differently. We have learnt using magic can be like that too. We have five or six recorded ways of doing some spells, but not all work for the same person and some of us learn a different way on our own.”

We watched as the six kids were trying to build small houses out of light wood based materials. They had been told what materials they could use and a maximum size to build the house. They were building faerie houses. Tiana came over, and I introduced her to Heidi.

“Crap,” said one small girl, as her house folded over and leant drunkenly to one side. She looked at it in disgust with her hands on her hips. Heidi couldn’t help herself and had to inspect the little house.

Tiana and I watched as the two interacted and was surprised that Heidi was offering workable suggestions and then assisting my daughter Sam, as she tried Heidi’s way. They wiggled the house, and it stayed firm.

They beamed at each other in their delight. Sam asked Heidi a question, and they got involved in the project. I decided that Heidi would find her place in the scheme of things. She wasn’t as useless as she thought she was. Tiana kissed my cheek and said I was wonderful.

Oh shucks!

I went and collected Toby and Kathy to go treasure hunting.

We went back to the ship to inspect the sixth floor. I found the room Toby said was the treasury. I had little trouble removing the spells on the door before we entered. I don’t believe the water had been in here. The door had been sealed tight.

We looked at each other and then back into the room. We had found a couple of hundred boxes stacked on shelves that had people’s names on them. I found one that belonged to the bloke Guanith who had died and opened it.

To me most of it was junk. “I suppose he thought the items could be useful. I guess a lot of the refugees hadn’t put a lot of thought into where they were going as long as they got off the planet,” I said aloud.

Tory said, “Jina said that there are three groups of shifters with about twelve people in them. They had put a lot more thought into what they would find. They would like to be the groups that went to the outposts.”

I nodded. I’d had a chat with Jina the afternoon before. Monday’s were her day to come visit me. She had turned up earlier than usual, as she wanted to talk about the refugees. We had fun doing a bit of catching up first.

I’d enjoyed having Indi with me when away, but I still loved sleeping with my other girls when at home. Indi thinks I’m a little weird because I still insist Sunday is my night off when I’m away from home with one of the other girls like her.

Jina had told me that the Shifters had wanted to move to start a new life. Our biggest problem was they expected to be allocated a parcel of land that was theirs and to produce and sell their produce as they had previously. They wanted to set up a town structure with all that that entailed to their understanding.

While we did barter on a very small scale, the simple thing was, everything went into the community coffers, and if you needed it, you helped yourself or asked the zoetics that looked after the stores.

You must remember nearly two-thirds of our community was under sixteen. Plus we were very different to even the Shifters that had come here. Some of the refugees didn’t like being told by a nine-year-old, how the world worked.

The refugees had been with us for less than three weeks, and they were causing massive problems. I probably shouldn’t have left them to the girls to sort out. I did my best to apologise to Jina.

She made sure she extracted her dues from my hide. Sometimes a bloke just has to lie back and take a good tongue lashing. Damn, Jina sure knew how to lash my body with that long tongue of hers.

At dinner that night, Toby had explained that our community was more like what his, once was. He said that after the third lot of wheelships had left five hundred years before, people started to realise the prophecy that their worlds were doomed was coming true.

They’d had some massive sun flares. They had affected the shields on many worlds and caused death and destruction on a level his people hadn’t encountered in many millenniums. New diseases started appearing, and the people’s primal fears that had been long suppressed had arisen on many worlds.

The people started to change. They become more protective of what they considered theirs and class distinction became more of an issue as a result. Common people, who didn’t have magical tendencies and were the greatest majority, began to resent those who did because they had the greater chance of survival.

He said that the men were the worst. They were blaming everything on women not knowing how to run things, even though they had been doing it longer than their recorded memories and their worlds had not known war or famine in all of that time.

He mother said that some form of radiation from the flares and primal fears were making the men more aggressive. As a result, female magicians, in particular, started packing up their families and moving off the planets and going to the new worlds.

This made things worse because the common people soon learnt how much they had depended on the magicians. Men started treating their women more as subservient, and some even started new religions that preyed on people’s fears. When he left, his Earth was not a nice place to live.

His mother hadn’t encouraged him to develop his talents. However, when she found they were looking for people who had them, she had gotten him to the testing station. He had passed the tests so he could be sent through the portal to the ship. He couldn’t leave the station to say goodbye to his mother as they said it was too dangerous for him to do so.

I closed the lid of the box of junk and sighed. Now Toby’s people were my people and threatening all Tory, and I had achieved. I almost wished I could put them back in stasis and forget about them. I chided myself for my uncharitable thoughts.

In reality, most of them were trying. There were really only about ten of them that I could see causing real problems. The problem was they were mostly commoners, and they were neither Grandteli nor shapeshifters. They had purchased their passage.