Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)(13)

"You and I are so totally going to be best friends," I said.

"Are we?" she said, and grinned at me. "I don't know. What are the hours?"

"The hours are terrible," I said. "And the pay is even worse."

"Will I be treated horribly?" she asked.

"You will cry yourself to sleep on a nightly basis," I said.

"Fed crusts?" she asked.

"Of course not," I said. "We feed the crusts to the dogs."

"Oh, very nice," she said. "Okay, you pass. We can be best friends."

"Good," I said. "Another life decision taken care of."

"Yes," she said, and then moved away from the rail. "Now, come on. No point wasting all this attitude on ourselves. Let's go find something to point and laugh at."

Phoenix Station was a lot more interesting after that.

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Here's what I did when my dad took me down to Phoenix: I visited my own grave.

Clearly, this needs an explanation.

I was born and lived the first four years of my life on Phoenix. Near where I lived, there is a cemetery. In that cemetery is a headstone, and on that headstone are three names: Cheryl Boutin, Charles Boutin and Zoe Boutin.

My mother's name is there because she is actually buried there; I remember being there for her funeral and seeing her shroud put into the ground.

My father's name is there because for many years people believed his body was there. It's not. His body lies on a planet named Arist, where he and I lived for a time with the Obin. There is a body buried here, though, one that looks like my father and has the same genes as he does. How it got there is a really complicated story.

My name is there because before my father and I lived on Arist, he thought for a time that I had been killed in the attack on Covell, the space station he and I had lived on. There was no body, obviously, because I was still alive; my father just didn't know it. He had my name and dates carved into the headstone before he was told I was still around.

And so there you have it: three names, two bodies, one grave. The only place where my biological family exists, in any form, anywhere in the universe.

In one sense, I'm an orphan, and profoundly so: My mother and father were only children, and their parents were dead before I was born. It's possible I have second cousins twice removed somewhere on Phoenix, but I've never met them and wouldn't know what to say to them even if they existed. Really, what do you say? "Hi, we share about four percent of our genetic makeup, let's be friends"?

The fact is, I'm the last of my line, the last member of the Boutin family, unless and until I decide to start having babies. Now, there's a thought. I'm going to table it for now.

In one sense I was an orphan. But in another sense...

Well. First, my dad was standing behind me, watching me as I was kneeling down to look at the headstone my name was on. I don't know how it is with other adoptees, but I can say that there never was a time with John and Jane that I didn't feel cherished and loved and theirs. Even when I was going through that early puberty phase where I think I said "I hate you" and "Just leave me alone" six times daily and ten times on Sunday. I would have abandoned me at the bus stop, that's for sure.

John told me that back when he lived on Earth, he had a son, and his son had a boy, Adam, who would have been just about my age, which technically made me an aunt. I thought that was pretty neat. Going from having no family on the one hand to being someone's aunt on the other is a fun trick. I told that to Dad; he said "you contain multitudes," and then walked around with a smile for hours. I finally got him to explain it to me. That Walt Whitman, he knew what he was talking about.

Second, there were Hickory and Dickory to the side of me, twitching and trembling with emotional energy, because they were at the gravesite of my father, even if my father wasn't buried there, and never was. It didn't matter. They were worked up because of what it represented. Through my father, I guess you could say I was adopted by the Obin, too, although my relationship to them wasn't exactly like being someone's daughter, or their aunt. It was a little closer to being their goddess. A goddess for an entire race of people.

Or, I don't know. Maybe something that sounds less egotistical: patron saint, or racial icon or mascot or something. It was hard to put into words; it was hard to even wrap my brain around most days. It's not like I was put on a throne; most goddesses I know about don't have homework and have to pick up dog poop. If this is what being an icon is all about, on a day-today basis it's not terribly exciting.

But then I think about the fact that Hickory and Dickory live with me and have spent their lives with me because their government made it a demand of my government when the two of them signed a peace pact. I am actually a treaty condition between two intelligent races of creatures. What do you do with that sort of fact?

Well, I tried to use it once: When I was younger I tried to argue with Jane that I should be able to stay up late one night because I had special status under treaty law. I thought that was pretty clever. Her response was to haul out the entire thousand-page treaty - I didn't even know we had a physical copy - and invite me to find the part of the treaty that said I always got to have my way. I stomped over to Hickory and Dickory and demanded they tell Mom to let me do what I wanted; Hickory told me they would have to file a request to their government for guidance, and it would take several days, by which time I would already have to be in bed. It was my first exposure to the tyranny of bureaucracy.