Sherry unplugged her bookreader from the library terminal and retrieved her ID card. She leaned back in the chair and started sorting the articles she'd found by publication date.
"Excuse me?"
Sherry twisted around in the chair. A lady with a little girl in tow was standing behind her.
"Are you finished with that library?"
"Oh, sorry, yes I am." Sherry stood up and picked up her bag. She really should do her assigned work before looking up newer articles as the teacher suggested.
She found an empty meeting room and pulled out her homework, trying to resist the pull of the articles she'd just borrowed from the library.
She breezed through most of the homework--a lot of it was review for her, her school must have been more advanced them some other schools in other parts of the world. Science wasn't that easy, but Michi had started helping her review the stuff she'd missed in previous years, and it was starting to look familiar.
She finally finished all the homework she had assigned, even the stuff that wasn't due right away.
Sherry glanced around the empty room, then called up the articles she'd borrowed. She chose one at random, and started reading.
And stopped, halfway through. This was so completely wrong. It had to be. Creatures like the ones described here couldn't take the part they did in the colony according to what she'd read earlier.
She read another one at random. It also said that the lerkkal were clever animals, building what they did out of instinct much like beavers did. A third article sounded a lot more like the very first one, that the lerkkal were very smart and humans just didn't fully understand them.
Sherry yawned and checked her watch. Almost lights out; those articles took a lot longer to read them she had expected. And she had way more lined up them she could get through in one night, even if she only skimmed the abstracts.
Athough...
Sherry made a note to herself to list all the articles by date, source, and the general attitude of the abstract. And, she reminded herself, a note on who had funded the study, just like the teacher had suggested.
#
"Can you believe it!" Cathy said, putting her plate down with a thump and knocking her fork to the floor. "We finally start to cover the colony's history, and the teacher hardly says anything about the help the colonists got from the lerkkal, and even implies that they were just a pack of animals living nearby and being a nuisance!"
Kara rolled her eyes. "Come on, face it, the colonists still don't know squat about the lerkkal. They seem clever enough, but even chimps can be taught to ask for what they want, and nobody fries to claim they're sentient."
"You're wrong. The lerkkal are too sentient and you'll see that as soon as we get to Velfard colony. Sherry? You wrote that article about Velfard a couple of weeks ago, did you see anything about the lerkkal?"
"Just because they wander the streets of the colony and are tolerated doesn't make them our equals!" Kara said, cutting Sherry off.
"They are not just tolerated!" Cathy shoved her chair back and stomped away.
Kara sighed. "What an over-reaction. I guess when you want to believe something you don't listen when people say you're wrong."
"A lot of people and a lot of studies say that the lerkkal one very intelligent."
"Ever heard of biased reporting, Sherry? You've worked for papers before, you should have."
Sherry put down her fork. "I'm going to go find Cathy."
Kara sighed behind her as she walked toward the door.
Sherry looked up and down the hall. Where would Cathy go? She picked a direction--it looked to her like Cathy had turned around as she went out the door, instead of continuing in the same direction. So not to their room. Of course not to their room--Sherry had a sudden urge to kick herself. Their room was also Kara's room.
She walked quickly down the hall, looking in every unlocked room she passed. An open window in one of the meeting rooms made her jerk back and close her eyes.
Just stars. Stars are up, she told herself. If stars are up, then I'm not necessarily up high.
She held onto the door frame and cracked one eye open. Just stars.
Sherry forced herself to stay still and look at the window, like the headshrinker back home had done when trying to cure her. It hadn't worked, she was still terrified of heights, but she could at least look out a high window now, even if she couldn't get close to it and look down.
She stayed there until she had her breathing under control. That first day, it had definitely been the Earth's curve just peeking up above the bottom of the windows in hall four that had told her she was very high.
Cathy.
She pushed herself away from the door, letting it close behind her. Down the hall, checking more empty rooms. She paused at the door to the first observation lounge she came to. If she skipped it, she might miss Cathy. It wouldn't surprise her at all to find Cathy looking out at the stars.
She braced herself and pushed the door open.
Stars, all around. Actually, only on one of the walls, with floor to ceiling windows. She heard somebody sniff quietly, the sound cutting through the roaring, sucking sound that echoed in her ears.
Sherry held on to the doorframe and scanned the room. A couple of people in one corner, reading; a man stretched out in a seat, maybe sleeping, and somebody sitting on the floor near the window, hugging her knees. Sherry took a cautious step into the room.
"Cathy?"
One of the people reading looked up at her. She walked between couches, trying to get closer to Cathy and stay away from the windows at the same time.
"Cathy?" Sherry started getting dizzy. The stars kept going, lower, lower, well below her feet.
"Go 'way."
"I think Kara was being awfully mean," Sherry said.
"But you agree with her."
"No. Can you come sit with me? Away from the windows?"
"Why should I. Everybody just makes fun of me for being a space nerd."
Sherry took a half-step forward, and fell. She covered her eyes, leaning against the side of a couch while trying to stop shaking.
"Sherry? Sherry? Are you ok? What are you doing in here? I thought--" A hand shook her shoulder, making her feel like she was going to tip off the ledge and fall forever.
"M'ok," Sherry said. "Just stop tipping me over."
"What?"
Sherry braced her hands on the floor, faced them, and slowly opened her eyes.
"I'm ok," she repeated. "How about you? It sounded like you and Kara had been arguing for a while."
Cathy took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. "She was so nice up to now. But the teacher in history class was saying the same horrible things, and when I said the teacher had it wrong, they were smart we just didn't understand them yet, he said what Kara said, that I ignored the facts because I wanted them to be smart." Cathy sniffed again, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"He said that to me too, only not that I wanted to believe, that an article I had borrowed from the library wanted to believe. And Michi believes you too, she's bugging me to write an article about them and what we know about them."
"Really? Are you gonna?"
Sherry looked up. "I don't know. I really don't know. There are all kinds of studies saying they're smart, and all kinds of studies saying they aren't."
"They are."
Sherry nodded. "The teacher said to look at the study, and who wrote it, and who paid for it, because people make the facts fit what they want to believe."
"He's wrong, the lerkkal are intelligent."
"I'm still trying to figure out if there's a pattern, which studies are paid for by which people." Sherry laced her fingers together and stared at them. "It isn't easy. All the studies present themselves as unbiased and scientific, but those groups are so different one of them has to be biased."
"Can I help? If I have something to back me up, maybe Kara will admit she was wrong."
"Sure. Let me give you a copy, I borrowed them all from the library at the same time. They should be good for another week or so, before they expire."
Sherry put her bookreader on the floor beside Cathy's, and let them copy the articles she'd marked. "That's everything I could find on the lerkkal. I hope I didn't miss anything."
Their bookreaders beeped at the same time, and they picked them up. Sherry flipped the cover over hers, but Cathy paged down through the list of article titles.
"Wow, you weren't kidding when you said you got everything you could find. Hah, even a tabloid article."
Sherry felt her face heat up. "I didn't read them at the library station, I just downloaded everything."
Sherry put the finishing touches on her article about the upcoming performance by the choir club. Halfway through the trip and people were starting performances and tournaments already.
Speaking of which... she closed her bookreader, and changed into her sports clothes.
Kara had left a few minutes earlier, not saying anything. She hadn't said much to any of them since that argument a week and a half ago.
Sherry hurried up the stairs to the gymnasium for the warmup before the first round of pre-tournament games.
The gaggle of "non-competitive" gigglers were listlessly bouncing the ball over their net as the coach worked drills with everybody else. As her muscles loosened and she warmed up, Sherry wondered why she had been so worried about not being on a competitive team. Nobody worried about the score while playing, that was distracting. They were supposed to just play.
The coach had long since split them up into teams evenly matched by skill, placing Sherry and Kara on different teams.
The second game that day put them against each other. When both Sherry and Kara were at the net, face to face, Sherry tried to get Kara's attention.
"Can we talk after?" she whispered just before the serve.
Kara didn't reply, and set the ball for a teammate to spike.
"Kara, please. Can we talk?"
Kara's next move was to spike directly at Sherry's face. Sherry ducked, and the ball bounced off of her elbow and off the court. They rotated, and Kara was out of whispering distance again.
Next time around, Sherry repeated her question.
"What, found out geek girl was wrong?" Kara hissed.
"No, I just want to stay friends."
"Fine. Talk. Five minutes, at dismissal." Kara jumped for another spike, and Sherry followed her up, jamming the ball back. It hit the ground on Sherry's side of the net, and they rotated out of whispering distance again. That game, and the next, dragged on until Sherry was almost ready to scream at the clock to move faster.
Finally, finally, after the end of game pep talk, after the reading of the scores, after the ritual go-round of high-fives, they were dismissed. Sherry hurried over to Kara.
"So. What did you want?"
"I want us to be friends again. You don't have to agree with your friends about everything, right?"
"So you're saying you still think geek girl is right, even without any proof beyond some vague mention of research."
"I have found research that supports both you and Cathy. I don't know what to believe right Now. All I know is that hating each other over some aliens we've never met is just stupid."
"Well, if that's all you know, you should probably learn that trying to please everyone is a waste of effort. Pick a side."
"I pick my own side then, the side of waiting to see for myself."
"That's not picking a side. Do you think the aliens are intelligent or not?"
Sherry bit her tongue, trying to keep from saying "more than you are."
"They just can't keep up with us, Sherry. They're intelligent enough to be trained for certain tasks, but if we don't help them they'll be wiped out."
"I still choose to wait and see. Can we be friends as we were before? There are no aliens in our group, so why does their intelligence have to affect us?"
Kara looked at her shoes. "We'll see."
#
"I don't know," Cathy said. "She's pretty convinced of the stuff in the 'animal' group. And I found out who a lot of those studies were funded by, by the way. Some of her families, or maybe the school system in her hometown, must have been pretty rabidly xenophobic. I know my hometown wasn't so great. I got made fun of a lot, for being a space nut and being interested in the lerkkal."
"Afraid? But she's just sure they're not smart, she's not afraid of them."
Cathy shrugged "Fear or dislike, it's still xenophobia. But I won't mention them if she won't."
"That's what she said."
"Mmm. Anyhow, a lot of the groups that did the studies that I was looking at all come back to one of three big non-profits. One, the colonial society, basically says up front that they believe humans are the pinnacle of evolution and that we should go forth and colonist all the worlds we can get our hands on."
"Yeah, I saw their name a lot. I'm starting to see what the teacher meant about people interpreting results to match what they want to believe."
Cathy grinned. "Even though he was referring to me, and other people who believe the lerkkal are intelligent."
"And on the 'sentient' side of the argument, we have a couple of universities, a couple of groups of the original colonists, and a group sent by the UN to live with and study the lerkkal."
"Likewise, plus a non-profit whose goal is to find intelligent non-human life. Seti--they've been around for about forever, searching."
"How could anyone believe that the aliens are just animals with all those unbiased sources saying they're smart?"
"Beats me." Cathy tapped her bookreader's screen a few times. "Let me give you a copy. Are you going to do that article like Michi suggested?"
"I don't know. I don't want Kara to get mad, and I don't want to get in trouble with the teacher--"
"You really should do it. Let people know that there's more to the story than what they're learning in history class. And you're a good writer. I saw lots of people leading your painting club article, and let's face it, unless you're in that club it's not a very interesting subject."
"There's no such thing as current events when you're between places," Cathy said. "You can't possibly know what's going on at Velfard colony."
"You had to have heard though, it's all over the ship." Jess looked around the lunch table. "The seperatists have really stepped up their efforts to be recognised as a nation instead of a colony."
"Rumour," Cathy and Kara said simultaneously, then glared at each other.
"There's just no way of getting news," Cathy started.
"The seperatists are just a small noisy group. There aren't enough of them to actually separate. Besides, what use is separation? You lose all the services the UN provides colonies, and you gain a name without 'colony' in it." Kara stabbed a piece of chicken for emphasis.
"They gain a lot more than that, Kara." Michi put her fork down and started counting items on her fingers. "They get to decide their own government, they get a seat on the council back on Earth, they can set up their services and stuff the best way for their situation, not how some old fart who's never been off Earth thinks it should be set up, they don't have to wait four months for questions to be answered about the issue of the day..."
"Yeah, but is Earth doing such a bad job of it?" Kara waved her fork around the table.
"The separatists think so." Jess took another bite of her salad. "And why shouldn't they get to be their own country? They're well settled in, they don't need help from Earth anymore, they've been a colony for like a hundred years or something now, so why not?"
Kara looked around the table, then shook her head and went back to eating. "Rumour."
"It has to be though. I mean, radio doesn't leave normal space."
"Maybe it came in on the radio just before we left normal space, I don't know. But everybody's talking about it. You should put it in the newsletter."
"We don't have a 'rumours' column," Michi said.
"No, but if we interview somebody who would know for sure--like one of the ship's officers who does radio..."
"You go right ahead, Sherry. If you want it, it's yours."
"Yeah, do it Sherry!" Jess said.
"Sure, why not. But only if I can get facts, not hearsay. I do have some standards, you know."
Cathy leaned forward. "I'm getting curious, though. I'll see if I can help you get an interview through the spaceflight club. We've talked to the comms officer twice already."