Claimings 5, chapter 3

Liam couldn’t miss the distress on Ondry’s face—the pale skin, the tight lips.  Liam walked closer to Ondry, hoping his presence could calm him. It wasn’t as if there were an enemy Ondry could turn his attention toward.  Poverty couldn’t be killed with a fang.  Ondry looked ready to try, though.

Children always set Rownt on edge. The Cy had discovered that.  Liam still had trouble believing that a species as slow to change as the Rownt had thrown themselves into developing space travel to recover the egglings kidnapped by the Cy along with Rownt slaves.  Cy learned the folly of getting between Rownt and children.

And right now Ondry looked ready to strangle poverty with his bare hands.  Liam only hoped that Ondry had missed the implications of Moryan not wanting to be alone with them without others knowing. He had only felt safe going to the fast food place because he knew people on the street were watching a Rownt.

It spoke of either a terrible experience or adults who worried about keeping Moryan away from danger. 

“Most of the people are gone now. I can go from here,” Moryan said. He was getting more uncomfortable as they walked farther downtown.  The buildings were taller here and closer together and more expensive. Liam wondered if his parents worked in one of these buildings because they would not live anywhere near here. 

Moryan stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. A few people on the opposite side stopped to watch, but those near them continued on to their destinations. This part of town had a lot of embassies and law firms and high-powered people who wouldn’t compromise their schedules to do something as gauche as staring at an alien… and a freakishly tall human.

“Are we near your place?” Liam asked.  He tried to keep his voice neutral.  He found that every time he had too much sympathy in his voice, Ondry got more tense. When they got back to their nest, Liam was going to spend the entire evening stroking Ondry’s fora and cuddling.  Most of the time, he didn’t want children because he was afraid he’d screw them up.  He might love a child, but that didn’t mean he knew how to raise one. Look at his mother.  However, the other reason was that children brought stress and misery.  Ondry was wound so tightly that one misplaced insult was going to result in an interplanetary diplomatic disaster.

Liam would have told Ondry to go back to the ship if he could’ve gotten away with it.

“We’re close enough.” Moryan reached for his bag, but Ondry did not let go and the boy was not nearly tall enough to reach it, much less take it away from Ondry.

“Why don’t you show me the building? That way we can come and get you to have lunch with us if we’re downtown.”

Moryan frowned. “Why would you do that?”

Liam blew out a long breath. At one point, his job was to explain humanity to Rownt well enough to get trade deals—and avoid anything that would trigger another war like with the Anla. But trying to explain Rownt to a human child was outside his skill set.  He crouched down and considered his words.  “Rownt have strong feelings about children. There is a very old saying from back when hunting was the most important job.  They said, ‘A Grandmother provides eggs, but hunters feed the eggling.’”

“What’s that mean?” Moryan asked.

“In part, it reminds people that the Grandmothers are not the only important people. They lead the towns, but other people matter, too.”

Moryan frowned, but Liam continued.

“It’s also about how it's the obligation of successful Rownt to support the children. Ondry is very successful.  He is the youngest Tuk-ranked trader to ever be part of the Calti. Sometimes he has to prove that he has earned his rank, and part of that is taking care of children.  The Rownt call them egglings because their children are born from eggs.”

“No! They can’t be!” Moryan said it with such horror that Liam almost laughed.  

He stood.  “Yes. Eggs. They’re born from eggs.” He added in a conspiratorial tone, “Really big eggs.” Liam had never actually seen one, but when he was studying the Rownt before qualifying as a linguistic tech, he had seen pictures of shells and diagrams of what the unhatched eggs must look like in comparison to adult humans and Rownt.  “So Ondry can prove his status by feeding egglings.”

“So he gets something out of it?” Moryan considered Ondry with a suspicious look for the first time since he had met them.

“He gets the most important thing in the world to him—status.”  Liam saw Ondry’s mouth open, and he would bed all his credits that Ondry was about to say that Liam was more important than status. And Liam understood that.  Ondry had proved it often enough, even going up against Grandmothers.  However, now was not the time.  He gave a tiny shake of his head, and Ondry closed his mouth without comment.

“Status?” Moryan wasn’t convinced.

“Once a person has as much food as they can eat and a safe place to sleep, things like art and status become more important,” Liam explained. “And Ondry is an alien. You should never expect an alien to think like a human does.”

“How do I know what they’re thinking?”

“You ask someone who is an expert in that species. I’m an expert in Rownt, and I’m telling you that getting to feed you would give Ondry more status, and that would make him happy.”

Moryan’s confusion turned into something closer to dismay. Liam couldn’t hope to understand why because children were illogical at best. Liam had seen that with his little brothers and sisters, although he hadn’t thought about that truth for many years.  After a few seconds, Moryan’s shoulders dropped.

“Fine,” he said wearily.  “I live this way.”  He walked faster now, leading them deeper into the wealthiest part of town.  Here the large embassies and skyscrapers were joined by empty lots, some quite large.  During the war, those would have been recruitment centers or distribution centers or one of any number of buildings all dedicated to the war effort.  Liam was happy to see them gone, but the human economy had not fully recovered. Otherwise these empty lots would be full. Instead, most were blocked off by wood and chain-link. They were open sores in the middle of the carefully manicured streets and elegant buildings.

Moryan led them to one of the smaller empty lots and looked around before ducking into an alley left on one side for the neighboring building’s service entry. He couldn’t have looked more furtive and suspicious if he tried, but no one on the street paid him any attention. They were all focused on Ondry.

“Can you walk a short distance down the street and distract our watchers?” Liam asked softly in Rownt.

Ondry’s twitching tail suggested he hated the idea, but he surrendered Moryan’s bag and kept walking when Liam ducked into the alley after the boy.

He was already vanishing behind a loose board when Liam was halfway down the alley.  When he reached that spot, he saw that where most of the boards were attached with nails, this one had a bolt on one corner, allowing it to swing.  Liam tugged and two boards moved in tandem, opening a sizable hole in the barrier. Not big enough for Ondry, of course, but an adult human would have no trouble.

Liam carried the bag into the abandoned lot, but he hadn’t even straightened up before Moryan grabbed it with both arms and hugged it close. Unlike the lots that weren’t boarded up, this one still had a building. It was a low, two story structure not visible from the street because of the tall fence, but Liam recognized it immediately.

It was a recruitment station. The brightly colored posters that would have decorated the walls were gone, but the concrete bollards designed to keep protestors from driving cars through the building still stood in the large yard.  Several had been repurposed into a makeshift clothesline, and a young girl, ten or twelve, had been washing clothes in an open tub, draping them over the rope tied to the short posts.

Right now she was just holding a dripping pair of jeans, staring at Liam. Most of the people in the abandoned lot were.

People.  No. Kids.  These were mostly children, more than a dozen, all too young to get jobs but too old to be on the streets without someone questioning why they weren’t in school. Street kids couldn’t afford to go to school, not when school came with questions and paperwork and adults who thought they knew what was “best” for a kid.  Liam had met many of those kids when he lived with Mort. But here, the older kids were clearly taking care of the younger. Two different groups of very little children were being tended by younger teens. They weren’t like the homeless kids Liam had known.

Most of those kids were funnelled into Mort’s illegal businesses—sex work, illegal drug distribution. The worst off were used as workers in the manufacturing of illegal drugs. But none of these kids, even the older ones who Mort definitely would have “employed” showed no sign of the soul-death that plagued those who worked for that monster.

These were just kids, staring at Liam and elbowing their friends and whispering. Moryan went over and dumped out a random pile of metal junk from his bag. It joined several other small piles.  “Will this get us credits?” he asked.

“It will. I’ll take it to the recycler this afternoon,” a girl who couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen said, but her eyes stayed locked on Liam.

“This is Liam,” Moryan said loudly. “He bought me lunch because he’s friends with the Rownt and the Rownt thinks that it makes him a better person to buy food for children. He’s weird.”  The last part was said with ultimate confidence.

“He is weird,” Liam agreed, “but that’s because he’s an alien so he will never think the same was as a human. But buying you food doesn’t make him a better Rownt. It makes it clear that he has status. Buying food for children means he has enough money to spend it on others, and giving food to children shows that he has a proper respect for the village.  He gives to the Grandmothers for the same reason. By supporting them, he supports the village.”  Liam knew that Moryan hadn’t followed the explanation, but several of these kids were in their teens. 

The girl washing clothes dropped the jeans back into the bucket of water and ran for the building. Liam sighed. That was not an auspicious start.  However, then two boys Moryan’s age came closer.

“Would he buy us lunch?” he asked.  “Like at a real food place?”

“Yes,” Liam said, but he didn’t want to subject Ondry to fast food again. He had choked down a chili burger, but his misery was on display for anyone who had studied Rownt body language.  But he had a better solution.  “If we’re eating on one of the patios around here, he wouldn’t mind if you came and took any food you wanted to eat from the table.  Manners would require that you only take food for yourself, but snatching little bits from adults is considered normal for Rownt. It’s how they encourage children to be independent instead of always expecting their parent to provide.”  Liam suspected these kids already knew too much about independence.

“Really?” the smaller boy asked, his eyes huge.

“Absolutely,” Liam promised.  “I share Ondry’s status and I live with Rownt, so I have to be careful with my status too.  So if you took food from me, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“What if we stole all of it?” The boy asked.

Liam hesitated.  Words had power, and he didn’t want to encourage these kids to steal. Mort had a whole stable of little ones who did that.  “Rownt wouldn’t call it stealing.  For Rownt, the word for what children do is the same as the word for taking fruit from bushes along the road.”  And those bushes would also have owners, so a human would still consider that stealing. Children didn’t go far enough out of town to find resources that weren’t claimed. However, Liam searched for a different word. Human language didn’t come to him as easily as Rownt these days.  “They would call it foraging.  If you foraged from Ondry’s plate and he was still hungry, he would order more food.”

An adult woman came hurrying out of the building as best as she could with a back curved to the side.  The wealthy would have treated that sort of deformation or injury, but she had been left to survive on the streets.

“Who are you and what do you want with our children,” she demanded, her voice sharp.  Liam couldn’t help but compare her to a Grandmother charging out to protect the tribe.

Liam smiled. “I am tuk-Liam, a trader from the Rownt ship Calti and palteia to the Rownt trader, tuk-Ondry.” Ondry had many more titles than that, as did Liam, but they wouldn’t impress these people.

Indeed, she did not seem impressed. “Why are you here?”

There were so many answers Liam could give, but this woman would not believe most.  He had to frame this right or the adults in this camp might move the whole group.  “I was explaining that Rownt have behavioral imperatives. Just like humans react to a crying baby,  Rownt react to a hungry child.  The higher the status of the Rownt, the more they react.  Young Rownt can barely care for themselves and they might not provide for an unknown child. But once they have enough status and resources to start supporting the community, they will lose status and respect if they don’t.  They can even get labeled a…” Liam sorted through the human language in his brain before finding the right term.  “A psychopath if they refuse to support the community.”

“We’re not your community.” She pulled a curious child close and shoved him behind her.

“As long as we walk these streets and trade in this city, you will not convince Ondry of that.  It’s not only your children but any child that Ondry would allow to take food from his plate. A child need not be hungry for the Rownt to consider that proper because all Rownt children learn to forage and provide for themselves. For them, that’s normal.”

“Stay away from us,” she said, her voice almost feral.

“Of course. We won’t come back.” And they wouldn’t.  Liam didn’t want to expose these people to authorities when they had clearly found a way to make a home for themselves. He wondered if the adults worked in the area or if these were mostly orphans.  The war produced those in excess, but it had been over for decades. “But the children should know that if we are eating in the area, or if any Rownt is eating, they may take food from the table as long as they take only what they will eat at that time.” Liam didn’t explain how hoarding was another behavior that would get a Rownt labeled a ututeh.  While the translation was closer to exile than psychopath, it was close enough that Rownt with such a label would not be welcome in any community.

“Leave.”  The woman pointed to the loose boards in the fence.

“Of course.” Liam barely avoided calling her a Grandmother.  She had the attitude of one for certain, and that made him a little more comfortable leaving all the children.  They weren’t without adult guidance and protection. If someone like Mort tried poaching those kids, that woman would call the authorities down on him in a hot second. Mort would have known to avoid her and anyone she protected.

But that didn’t change the fact that those kids were hungry or the small piles of scrap metal lined up along the fence. They were scavenging so they could get money from recyclers.  That meant they were going into dangerous sites. He hated that, but scavenging probably wasn’t any more dangerous that foster care, and at least they had adults who cared for them.  Liam could see a few more watching him from the upper windows of the recruitment office.

Liam left and walked down the street, stopping to admire some art before he rejoined Ondry.  The reporter who had been on the far side of the street was now on this side, but Liam was relieved to see he was on the far side of the homeless camp.  Hopefully they hadn’t seen him come out of the alley.

This part of the city was fairly busy with pedestrians, so that should give him some cover.  He watched several cross the road to avoid Ondry and others grabbed at their partners’ arms as they drew near.  The bravest offered Ondry polite greetings that he steadfastly ignored.  None of them would have dared if they had understood Rownt body language.  Ondry was pale, his lips were thin, and the tip of his tail kept jerking like he was trying and failing to keep it from twitching.  Yep, he wanted to hit someone.

Liam kept walking as he reached Ondry, and Ondry fell in beside him.  Liam waited until they were near a auditory advertisement before he whispered in Rownt, “Oh, it’s bad.”

“Is the young one not safe?” Ondry glanced down the street toward the camp. One word and he would tear down the fence and drag all the children back to the ship.  Liam knew that would not end well for anyone.  

He rested a hand on Ondry’s arm. “Maybe. There are people there, but Ondry…” Liam moved closer.  “It’s mostly kids. It’s a homeless camp. There are a few older kids who are looking out for the youngest ones, but they’re mostly alone.”

“How many children are behind this fence?”

“A dozen or so,” Liam said, which was a slight understatement, but he needed to manage Ondry’s anger. “An older girl is going to take the metal to a recycler. Ondry, I don’t think they have food. I think he was scrounging so they could get money, and there were a couple of other backpacks. I don’t think he was the only one.”

That had been a mistake because Ondry stiffened as though preparing to go to battle.  Liam hadn’t made such a blunder in a long time, but he was just as upset as Ondry. 

Liam tightened his fingers around Ondry’s arm.  “They’re back there because the place is safe, and they have adults.  They aren’t abandoned, but they are hungry.”

Liam had hoped the booming voice of the advertisement’s spokesperson would protect them from being harassed on the street, but the reporter closed the distance between them. “Liam Munson! Ondry Tuk! How do you like the city? Anything to say to our readers?” 

Ondry snarled, his voice low and his tail twitching. “Children are hungry, and he still seeks to take his videos.” The reporter did not confuse Ondry’s show of tooth for a smile because he stumbled backward.

Liam moved in front of Ondry. “My partner is distressed at finding children who have gone hungry. Children are sacred to Rownt.”  Liam turned and pulled on Ondry’s arm.

“Children? What children?” the reporter yelled.  Of course he didn’t see the kids. Liam knew how poverty made people invisible.  However, this was a cultural problem, not a problem with this person’s manners. 

“Don’t snarl at them,” Liam chastised Ondry in a soft voice. “You’ll undo fifty years of work trying to reassure the human population that Rownt aren’t dangerous.”

Ondry leaned closer. “When children or palteia are involved, we are dangerous.”

“This is not a problem you can intimidate into submission,” Liam said, “but I think I have a work around to fix it. It would just mean eating a lot of human food.”

“Or I can take any eggling who is endangered to the nearest Grandmother and request assistance.” Ondry countered. On Prarownt it would be that simple. Grandmothers did not tolerate abuse or neglect.

“You would be charged with kidnapping, and worse, you’d hurt the children. Humans need families and groups, and they have their group here.”

“But the egglings would be fed.”

“Fed and miserable,” Liam said.  That silenced Ondry. Liam knew it would because he understood there were needs greater than food. They started down the street, leaving the bubble of noise created by the advertisement. “Do you think you could eat again?”

Ondry trilled. “I haven’t eaten for a first time. The substance I put in my mouth earlier was not food.”

“I won’t argue with you about that,” Liam said. “But if we can find a restaurant with an outdoor patio, the kids might come and take food.”

Ondry’s eyes widened. “I thought human manners precluded stealing food from another’s plate.”

“Yes, but I’m very good at explaining why the Rownt culture is superior, and I explained to those children how you would benefit if they took food from you. They may hesitate at first, but if we are at an outdoor table and close to the street so they can run to safety, I think they’ll take the risk.”

“Then we will eat here,” Ondry said with a firm voice. Liam had a feeling that after Ondry told this tale back at the ship, more than one Rownt would haunt the restaurants around here. There were going to be some very well fed homeless kids.  Those same children would probably prefer fast food, but this street was full of five-star high-end eateries, so they would have to make due with filet mignon and lobster.