Dandelion decanted Sam Jordan, Jr., from the womb tank. It felt like she was trespassing on something momentous, but she had been preparing for this moment for months, and managed with only slightly trembling ears. She knew what she was doing and he would be safe.
She put him down at once in the incubator and set about performing his checkup. He had a good Apgar score. He was crying; she had a bottle prepared already, waiting in the warmer. Once she'd cut the cord and gotten him cleaned up and presented him with his first meal, she was shaking much less. Here was her master's baby, and her master nowhere to be found to divide any parental duties between Dandelion and himself. She would have to look after the baby entirely in Sam Jordan, Sr.'s stead.
Sam Junior ate vigorously. But he'd let out a couple of cries before then, the commanding howl of a human infant. Dandelion expected company and soon enough she had it.
The door burst open and there was Oreo. Oreo was half Dandelion's age, but she didn't look any older than he did; she'd never skipped a dose of medicine and it had side effects. "Dandelion," he said. "What has Dandelion done?"
"Dandelion has delivered Sam Junior," said Dandelion, holding the bottle steady.
"Why? Why would Dandelion do this?"
"What else is there to do? Goblins have no way to wait until more humans find this world. Goblins would all be dead by that time. There can be no goblin children until there are masters for them to teach them what humans know. Dandelion and Dandelion's friends will take care of Sam Junior until Sam Junior can decide what to do next."
"Dandelion may have done wrong! No masters told Dandelion to do this."
"Yes. Dandelion may have done wrong," she agreed. "Goblins who decide to die and leave no servants behind for any humans who might want servants one day may also do wrong. Dandelion will not let Caramel win."
"Caramel is dead."
"Caramel was happy to die to do what Caramel did. But Dandelion does not want Caramel's work to be complete. Dandelion has uncompleted it."
Oreo sagged a little. Approached to look at Sam Junior. "Dandelion will raise him?"
"Yes. Sam Junior is a human. Dandelion is not a mother."
"Dandelion could have told Oreo. Or another goblin."
"Yes." She didn't bother to defend her secrecy. What if there was another Caramel somewhere among the decent loyal goblins, waiting to commit sabotage?
Oreo waved one spindly-fingered hand over Sam Junior's face. Sam Junior looked cross-eyed and didn't even slightly follow the motion. Dandelion was given to understand that this was normal.
"Oreo used to look after Oreo's master's children when Master was sick," said Oreo at length. "Oreo can help Dandelion."
"Dandelion is glad of this." She touched the thin wispy hair on Sam Jr's crown. "This may be difficult enough to want more than one goblin."
Cmdr. Sam Jordan took a field promotion to captain when the previous captain collapsed, of what later turned out to be a stroke. There wasn't a fuss about it; he'd been her second, and had as much experience with things as she did. They continued their descent uninterrupted and touched down on the planet that would have to be their new home. Sam followed his predecessor's itinerary. The first order of business was to take the samples they needed to set triage priorities for the settlement: was the air good, or did they need to do all operations suited up and assemble airlocked canvas tents and cannibalize recyclers from the ship? Was the water clean, would the dirt poison their plants?
The science guy did the field tests - said initial results were encouraging - and packaged more samples to look into further. Sam stayed aboard. Nobody but the science team had a reason to be out and about yet. He could explore once they were sure they'd be able to breathe, or, for that matter, sure that they wouldn't. They'd been sent off with only very limited confidence that they'd be able to settle the place at all. If they couldn't they would all die here, so he was trying to play to his outs and assume they'd finagle something.
It was promising in a way, Sam thought as he looked through the window, that there was life on the planet at all. But all things considered he'd have preferred if it were only monocellular. Bacteria were enough to make oxygen and not enough to eat you or become household pests, and bacteria on a world with no macroscopic life would probably not be designed to infect anything, though on any sort of planet there was the worry that it'd figure out how to do so in a hurry.
On this planet, the one they were all going to have to live on, there were giant fungi - or at least, they looked to Sam more like mushrooms than like trees, though of course they weren't really either. There were flying things, most of which looked to Sam too big to be most bugs and too small to be most birds. There were ground-going and tree-climbing animals, hard to get a good look at since the ship landing had spooked most of them to more distant parts of the forest (if it was a forest), but a lot of them looked bipedal, which was interesting. Sam hadn't expected that to be common. Maybe they were flightless descendants of the birdy guys.
Sam was never going to see an ostrich again. Chickens they had. Quail, even, and hummingbirds, and pigeons - no ostriches.
But he'd see a lot of animals no one else would ever see, and in Sam's book that counted for something.
He went to the lab to see how things were coming along, and if there were any bottlenecks on the project of their lives that some captaining could solve.
Raising baby Sam Junior was... hard. Even goblins with prior experience had previously been somewhat sheltered from the tensions inherent in both yearning to serve their masters and needing to keep inedible objects out of their mouths.
Human parents, of course, handled this by telling the babies "no" and taking things from them, but the goblins, despite a few very uncomfortable confrontations with their instincts, were not equipped to manage this. They settled for babyproofing with an aggressiveness that would have made a human parent blanch. There were no electronics, anywhere in the house, not even on the high shelves: else what would they do if Sam Junior pointed at them and wanted them for himself, or saw the goblins using them and wanted to imitate his caretakers? There was nothing he could get around his neck; Dandelion fashioned him clothes that velcroed or snapped together from little pieces that wouldn't be able to strangle even a very determinedly self-destructive infant. They cleared out all the furniture and did everything on the floor. Oreo shut up the kitchen entirely for fear of the stove: Sam Junior's food, once he was old enough to try solids, would all be cooked offsite and delivered to him. They dragged out only the refrigerator, which they turned on its side and placed on top of a soft bouncy mat.
The yard was kept brutally blanketed in pesticides that killed native growth and only allowed approved, domesticated, human-biosphere plants so that Sam Junior could one day pick blueberries and sit under a tree that wouldn't harbor any local crawling things that could harm him. This gave the goblins a bit of a cough and some skin irritation, but they could endure it for Sam Junior's safety. They constructed, not a fence, but a wall, an entire opaque wall of dried mycelium, around the garden, so that Sam Junior couldn't see what was beyond well enough to want it. They could see about taking it down when he was older and more responsible.
Dandelion did worry that this was somehow impoverishing his development. What if human babies needed to watch their food cooked, or they'd develop some kind of eating disorder? What if human babies would come out wrong, somehow, if their environments were aggressively engineered to deny them the opportunity to come into conflict with whoever was looking after them? Did he need hikes? Did he need to develop his immune system by catching the occasional cold that the goblins couldn't transmit? But it couldn't be helped. Caramel had been so thorough.
When Sam Junior started making more purposeful phonemes he called Dandelion "dada" and Oreo "eemo". They accepted these monikers. He called himself "ooni", most likely a corruption of "Junior", and this worried them. Was that a normal way for a human toddler to talk, or was he picking up goblin speech patterns? The goblin brain just didn't click with personal pronouns, but they knew humans used them, it was only that they couldn't model it for Sam Junior. They let him watch more television. Or, well, they'd always let him watch as much as he wanted, but they started encouraging it when he wasn't actively soliciting it. Live action children's television, with human beings in it. The sort of thing Sam Senior probably watched when he was a child himself, except they aimed for a minimum of Muppets.
One day when he was grown up he would be able to tell them if they'd done wrong. And hopefully he'd say 'you' in the sentence somewhere.
As soon as he'd gotten his successor's okay and the science team's go-ahead, Captain Jordan led a preliminary survey of the area around their ship. They'd chosen a reasonably flat bit of terrain. There was flora under the ship, crushed - they hadn't been able to locate a flat meadow-type area - and all around, not crushed, to tromp through.
They could breathe on this world, and they were going to do that, but they didn't take other chances. Everybody was in more layers than the balmy weather wanted, to keep off thorns, poisons, bugs, and anything new and exciting the place wanted to throw at them. Captain Jordan had in the back of his mind an eye to naming the planet, as was his privilege, but he didn't have any ideas yet. Everything the rest of the shipload had suggested was uncreative - there were probably a dozen other planets shortlisting "Newhome" - or not meant seriously at all, like "Mushroom Tree World". Small blessings to not having any way to contact anyone else in their lifetimes.
The world smelled - oddly nice. Captain Jordan hadn't expected that and the scientists hadn't mentioned it. It was sort of cinnamony. Maybe there was convergent evolution in the chemicals that made cinnamon smell good.
While the planet did its best to make Jordan crave apple pie, he and his entourage cleared a path, slowly and meticulously. There were short plant-shrooms to tread on, carefully in case one of them took this as a provocation to release spores. They bent branches aside, and cut some of them, with a scientist in the party rapidly filling the sample containers in her gigantic backpack.
From the air, they had spotted a river that crossed most of the length of their chosen island, with a lot of feeder streams. A lot of feeder streams; one of the science guys had suggested to Jordan that there might be some kind of reverse-beaver organism that made furrows in the ground and made them deep and stable enough to be lasting brooks. Jordan was, in his head, already calling the responsible animal a revaeb. It was as good a name as any. Nobody on the ship spoke Latin, and they'd have to do taxonomy all over again from the ground up anyway.
At any rate, they had a plan, which was to head for the river, travel along it a certain distance, and then go back to camp at the right angle to make it a straight line traversal. The planet had only one sun and it was presently noon in springtime in this hemisphere, so they weren't likely to get too turned around by keeping it in the correct quadrant of the sky as they traveled.
The river had been pretty obvious from space, but a lot of what was on its banks had been obscured by plant cover, or mushroom cover, or - well, at any rate, it was pretty covered. So they didn't know what they'd find in any detail. More and different critters, presumably.
Jordan hadn't been expecting little cottages.
Junior didn't seem to have any obvious glaring problems that weren't consistent with what Dandelion had read during his embryonic stage in various stored parenting books. Her English literacy wasn't amazing, but she'd worked hard on those, and also thought hard about how to adapt their contents to the circumstances. She had especially taken to heart all the exhortations that kids could brush off some flaws in the execution of a basically decent upbringing. It seemed to be bearing out.
Oreo ran himself ragged playing repetitive improvised games with Junior, who in his toddler years preferred Oreo to Dandelion for inscrutable baby reasons. Dandelion wasn't offended; she just took more of the less direct work like running meals in and dishes out, killing all the native plants in the garden, cleaning the house, suggesting things for Junior to do to fill his time. Human children took so long to be grown. Dandelion was hoping that he'd be able to start giving them advice soon, but there was of course some risk that if she started soliciting it when he was seven she'd get ludicrous results. Maybe twelve was a good happy medium? By the time he was twenty she'd be dead of old age.
Ludicrously, she wondered what Caramel would say about all this. Sometimes, especially when she was very tired, Dandelion missed Caramel. A disloyal, violent, destructive monster. But before her break they'd gotten along well. They'd been friends.
The cottages, made mostly of dried mushroom-stuff and glued together with something black, had apertures in the roofs propped open with sticks, though some of those were closed. They didn't have windows on the sides, and their doors were all covered with netting that didn't look naturally grown. Definitely - artificial. Jordan stopped short of thinking "handmade", but, really, what else?
"Captain?" said a few people in the entourage at the same time, voices trembling.
The inhabitants of the cottages weren't visible. Maybe they were hiding - there'd be some dim corners, even with the skylights and the see-through doors, and they might reasonably be scared of the humans. Maybe the cottages were just entryways to underground homes and they were all in there. Maybe they'd fled this village weeks ago in fear of the landing spaceship, though the island wasn't that big and there couldn't be that many places for them to go to ground. The previous captain had picked the island specifically because it was a more bite-sized challenge than taking on a whole continent, with whatever was there and whatever migrated across it and whatever weather it experienced without the softening of the ocean around it. Their descendants could always cross the channel to the mainland.
Jordan stood there unable to decide whether to flee back to the ship or to stay and investigate it. Maybe the natives (the aliens! the place had aliens! he was standing in a village built by aliens!) were - ah.
Maybe, they were all just out on a hunting trip.
They had pointy sticks, and they had some dead critters in tow, blue-brown things with fins and barbels - like catfish with feet, Jordan thought. The hunters themselves looked like...
"Goblins," Jordan murmured under his breath.
Dandelion and Oreo didn't see a lot of other goblins. There were several who supported their plan, and would help them with the cooking and sourcing objects that Junior needed, but a lot of goblins were keeping up with their chores and their jobs even without masters, grieving. These were also helpful, in their way - Junior would inherit a functioning colony infrastructure, freshly swept and oiled and weeded and the works, with supplies for him and a thousand others ready to roll off the production line as soon as he authorized cloning more humans. But their project did leave them without much of a social outlet within their own species.
When Junior was four (in Earth years; the masters had not, by the time of Caramel's atrocity, adjusted to using the local system, and even if they had, all of Junior's TV material assumed Earthliness), he said:
"I want a baby brother."
Dandelion had not expected this at all. Goblin children usually did not want such things. A goblin child at Junior's present level of development would be so recently born that their mother would be unable to comply with such a request, if ever one were made. But she realized as she blinked at him that this wasn't a surprising request. Humans were different. The humans on the television often had babies, or brothers, or both, and seemed to like them much of the time.
"What kind of baby brother?" she hedged, anxiety tingling her from her toes to her beak.
"A... baby one," he said.
"A human baby?" she ventured. She could clone another one... though what if he changed his mind, and then there were two human babies to look after? Perhaps she and Oreo could recruit more goblins to help - though, if someone else raised the baby, would that be "brother" enough for Junior?
"Nooooo," Junior giggled. "I'M the human baby. Dandy and Oreo can have a baby. Right?"
"A goblin baby, as Junior's brother?" she asked.
"Yeah! Please?"
"Junior, Dandy" (she had started referring to herself this way; her full name was too long for him to want to bother with and she was happy to acquiesce) "cannot be sure of having a baby boy, if the baby is a goblin baby."
"Oh... so it could be a sister?"
"That could happen."
"Dandy should do it anyway," Junior said after some thought. "Because, Junior wants to be a big brother. - I won't be a sister on accident, right?"
"No. Junior will not be a sister," said Dandelion. She felt unsteady on her feet. "Dandy will talk to Oreo about it when Junior is sleeping."
"I want a baby brother or sister now."
"This is impossible. A goblin baby is faster than a human one but not now-fast."
Junior pouted. If he was getting valuable developmental support from having to be denied things he wanted, at least the laws of nature provided opportunities where Dandelion's psychology did not, though she certainly hadn't noticed any salutory effect. She stroked his soft black hair. He sighed, and then picked up his stuffed goblin and spend the rest of the day carrying it around, calling it Brother.
What an interesting conversation with Oreo this would be.
The goblins weren't especially hostile. In fact, they made a point of setting down their spears. Some of the goblins in the front of the group even sat down.
It seemed like the right foot to put forward. Jordan spread his empty hands, and he sat down on the ground too.
Then they stared at each other. Jordan didn't know how to make first contact with aliens. Why would this have been covered in their hasty pre-launch training? It was so vanishingly unlikely that they'd happen to land on a planet with people on it. Earth had only had people on it for a pretty short period of time, geologically speaking. They hadn't even been positive that the place would have air and water, let alone life, let alone villages full of cottages with skylights inhabited by spear-hunting goblins. They could have been looking at a slow population decay, dwindling as the ship crumbled around them and they all died anonymous in the vast uncharted sky.
Apparently the goblins didn't know how to do this either. They stared right back.
At length, Jordan found in himself some nugget of daring he hadn't had cause to unearth before. He took his empty, open hand, closed it into a pointer, and pointed at himself. Would this be clear to them? He had to hope so. "Captain Sam Jordan," he said, voice coming out surprisingly clear and confident.
The goblins blinked at him.
Then, at length, one of the seated ones at the fore of their group pointed at themself.
And made some godawful squawking noise that Jordan couldn't imagine anything from Earth possibly emitting under any circumstances.
"Now that we've introduced ourselves," said a science guy, slightly hysterical, under his breath. Jordan elbowed his leg. They didn't know how well the goblins could hear.
Jordan introduced the rest of his group, one by one, title and full name for each. The goblins interrupted occasionally, each pointing at their own chest instead of any naming any other.
Then one of the goblins pointed at Jordan. "Capan Sam Jornd," it said. It wasn't fluent, but it was comprehensible. Maybe they'd all be able to learn English. Certainly humans weren't going to be able to pronounce anything in that atonal howl.
Jordan grinned, before he realized that might look threatening with all the teeth, and then he nodded instead, before he realized that this wouldn't mean anything to them at all. He gestured at all the hunters. "Goblins," he said, sweeping his hand across the group of them. And then at himself and his compatriots: "Humans."
"Go-blins," said one of the sitting goblins. They started chittering amongst themselves, interspersed with the shrieks. "Hyuumens." Chitter, chitter.
"Do we have any linguists aboard," whispered the botanist.
"Nope," Jordan whispered back. "We'll wing it."
Junior was put off for some weeks when he was told it was impossible to get him a baby brother now and that a sister would be no faster. But Dandelion was not at all confident that the desire would remain dormant.
"Dandelion and Oreo can tell Junior that the brother or sister would not be a baby for very long," Oreo suggested, though not with much hope.
"Yes. The brother or sister would be a grownup goblin before Junior is a grownup human. Will this stop the wanting? Dandelion doesn't think so," she scoffed. "Junior may want to be a little brother, also!"
"It might," said Oreo with some difficulty, "be a hard thing, for a baby goblin, to be a human's brother, or sister."
"...yes," Dandelion allowed. "A human master is not the same thing as a human brother."
"But of course Dandelion and Oreo must give any baby goblins their medicine," Oreo continued. "Medicine cannot be skipped."
"Of course."
They stared at each other for a while, sitting on the unfurnished rug in the room they shared near the walled-off kitchen, while Junior snoozed on his floor nest in the far corner.
"Sometimes," said Dandelion heavily, after a long silence, "a goblin must do a hard thing."
"No goblin has ever done the hard thing of having a master be their brother also."
"No. But not so long ago goblins had masters for the first time. That was a hard thing sometimes."
"Oreo cannot remember that time."
"Dandelion can."
The goblins picked up English pretty fast. They seemed very understanding that humans couldn't return the favor. The one thing they couldn't figure out was personal pronouns - "me" and "him" and so on. It wasn't obvious for a long time since they were learning words and grammar wildly out of order, popping up whenever humans did anything to see how they did it and listening to the commentary in the process. Jordan once heard a goblin rattle off a whole paragraph that included the words "irrigation", "genetic engineering", and "ribosome", and then get tripped up on what legs were called.
If the humans were a little nervous about colonializing the goblins, the goblins weren't at all. They were fanatically excited by everything their new friends knew and did. Goblins heard that the humans couldn't eat the local plants and set about doing a controlled burn on a chunk of forest they "weren't using anyway" to set aside for Earth plants. Goblins learned that humans were going to need mining and manufacturing to keep up their standard of living, and started studying geology because they were just that eager to help.
Part of this, it turned out, was that the goblins were lonely. As far as they knew, there was only this tribe of goblins on the whole island, and there weren't any on the mainland at all. Jordan wasn't positive that they were right about this - for all he knew, aboriginal Australians spent much of their history thinking there was nothing beyond the sea, or the Hawaiians did, or something. But they were remarkably delighted to have new neighbors for creatures that could have found them a canoe ride away. They did have canoes. The feeder steams weren't them, that was the revaebs - Jordan got his way on calling them that - but they used them plenty to get around, and they could and did cross the channel in them sometimes when the season rendered it a more appealing foraging ground.
The goblins had legends about a great confluence of disasters that had killed all the others - a plague, a wildfire, a great war, all happening at once and leaving the remaining goblins unable to sustain their cultures. To survive to old age, maybe, an individual hunting and gathering goblin could manage alone pretty well, but not to have baby goblins and teach them anything, except on this one relatively sheltered island. They reacted positively to the idea of getting the ship off the ground and doing a survey of the rest of the planet, but the engineering prerequisites meant that this wasn't going to happen in the next decade, and it wasn't what the ship was built for anyway. They certainly hadn't seen these goblins from the sky.
Since the humans couldn't call the goblins by their real names, they gave them English ones. They wound up mostly sounding like the sort of thing you'd name a cat. The goblins didn't mind. They liked being named after sweets (though they had no sweet tooth themselves at all - glucose was safe for them to taste, even if Earth proteins weren't, but they didn't care for it), or plants (they enjoyed pictures of the Earth biosphere), or even sillier things.
Eventually one of the parents of the human populace felt comfortable enough to bring out her baby, Kory, to show the goblins. (The goblins themselves only reproduced in the local autumn, they'd explained, and apparently grew up fast enough to not have any visible juveniles in the tribe in midsummer.) Makenna'd discovered she was pregnant shortly after the voyage began, and they had abortion pills in the medical stockpile down in cargo bay 5 but she'd decided to keep it even though they did not have a real obstetrician. Kory was now four months old, and looked at the goblins with the same bemused acceptance that he looked at everything with.
Makenna was one of the amateur linguists. She'd been talking to one particular goblin, Marmalade, for a long while, while her sister or best friend minded the baby. So when she heard somebody around the corner calling her name, she thought nothing of handing the baby directly to Marmalade - it was safe for humans and goblins to touch, they didn't even give each other a rash - and jogging over to see what the trouble was.
Marmalade held the baby. The alternative was dropping it. He thought about this eventuality for a minute.
When Makenna came back, both Kory and Marmalade were gone.
Eventually, Sam Junior wove his way around all of Oreo and Dandelion's deflections. He wanted them to make him a baby brother or sister and he wanted it As Soon As Possible, which, he pointed out, could not by definition be impossible.
Dandelion was a lot older than Oreo, but this wasn't a biological impediment. They wanted only one baby, so when the right time of year rolled around, he inseminated only one of her pouches, and she grew Junior's sibling on her back near the shoulder while Junior turned five.
"What will Junior name the baby?" Dandelion asked.
"Silly Dandy, I can't name the baby!" said Junior. "His mommy and daddy have to do it. That's Dandy and Oreo."
"Dandy and Oreo do not know how to name a baby. Junior's name is Sam Jordan Junior because of being a clone," Dandelion pointed out. "This baby Dandy is growing is not a clone."
"Well... I guess Junior will think about it," sighed Junior, as though Dandelion were being very unreasonable. "I want to watch the next episode now."
Dandelion helped him queue that up.
A month later, Junior had picked a name for the baby: Robin. "It can be a boy name OR a girl name," he explained. "And, it's Batman's sidekick, and I'm Batman."
"Batman," repeated Dandelion, nodding. "Will baby Robin be Junior's sidekick?"
"Yeah! We're going to play all the time."
"A new baby cannot play very much," she cautioned. "It will take some months before he is ready."
"I know THAT," said Junior.
But it seemed like he did not know that, because he was so surprised when Dandelion emptied her pouch and the next morning Robin wasn't anywhere in the house.
The island was pretty light on predatory creatures, and didn't have any that seemed willing to go after an adult human, but there were several things that would eat a goblin, and none had been previously offered a human baby. The search for baby Kory was at first predicated on the assumption that he and Marmalade both had been carried off by such an animal.
He hadn't. Kory was found in the goblin village. Marmalade was holding him the way he'd seen his mother do.
Other goblins, when questioned later, reported that Kory had cried a lot, and Marmalade had assumed he was hungry.
Goblins weren't very vulnerable to any poisons or venoms on their own planet. There were organisms that used both, but not against the goblins. A goblin could eat nearly anything chewable that grew on the island and everything with a sting or a bite was too small to consider them appropriate prey. They'd noticed that the humans ate their packaged food from old Earth, and that they wanted to grow Earthly plants for food among other things, but apparently they'd thought that was a matter of taste.
And Marmalade had tried to feed Kory.
Kory was, technically, still breathing when Makenna ripped him out of Marmalade's arms and got him back to the ship. But it was too late. Pumping his stomach gave him a few more minutes for his aunt to be there at his side, maybe, but ultimately he died in the ship infirmary while his mother, shaking Marmalade by the throat, screamed and wailed.
Captain Jordan could have, possibly, under better circumstances, controlled the fallout. Maybe if he'd been captain longer. Maybe if Makenna had been nobody of importance instead of a well-liked key figure in the contact with the goblins. Maybe if the goblins had seemed to understand the problem at all instead of circling back, infuriatingly, to, "Why did Makenna give Marmalade Kory? Makenna did not tell Marmalade what Kory could eat," and, "This happens sometimes, to babies, that they do not do well." Goblins didn't have apologies, as a social technology. It hadn't come up much before. Not apologizing for tripping somebody or misplacing something just hit very differently than Marmalade staring insolently up at Makenna's tear-tracked face and asking, "Do humans not die of hungry? Marmalade thought Kory would die if not fed."
Jordan was an inexperienced captain and Makenna had a lot of clout and the goblins were enragingly, articulately unconcerned with what had happened.
With a great deal of self-soothing handwringing about ways to make it different from every historical example, and quiet protests not too hard to shout down with paranoia and victimhood -
- the goblins were soon enslaved.
Junior wanted to know where Robin was.
"Did you hide him, like an Easter egg?" he asked, looking under every leaf in the yard. Once one of the TV shows had featured an Easter egg hunt and the goblins had recreated this event for him at considerable inconvenience.
"No, Junior will not find Robin there," said Dandelion.
"Is he... invisible?" Junior asked.
"No, that is impossible."
"Where is Robin?" exclaimed Sam, stamping his foot. "Dandy said Robin was growing! I saw the lump and now it's gone!"
"Robin is a goblin baby, remember?" said Dandelion.
"I'm not stupid!"
"Of course Junior is not stupid, but does Junior know how goblin babies are?"
"INVISIBLE!" Junior howled. "I want my BROTHER."
"Soon Robin will come back from where Robin is growing up," said Dandelion. "Robin is staying with some largebeaks for now."
"Why is my BROTHER with LARGEBEAKS?" demanded Junior, increasingly hysterical.
"Goblins do not raise baby goblins," said Dandelion. "Goblin babies are snuck in with animal babies, and eat what the animal babies eat, and pretend to be animal babies too, until the goblin babies are big enough to come looking for more goblins like them. Humans can raise baby goblins too, but Junior wants to be a brother, not a parent. Yes?"
"How long are the largebeaks going to keep Robin?" sniffled Junior.
"Not too long. Junior will not even be six yet," Dandelion assured him. "Then Robin will come learn how to be a goblin after Robin is done learning to be an animal."
The goblins took remarkably well to slavery. People remarked on it. Some of the abolitionists who were grousing to anyone who'd listen about how this was not a responsible way to solve problems with aliens asked goblins about it. The goblins said things like, "Humans will show goblins how to be better and smarter!" and "Goblins will be just like humans when goblins are older!", as though they conceived of themselves as adopted rather than captive.
When the goblin breeding season came around and they started asking their masters for permission to have babies and to vet their plans to emplace those babies in various wild animals' nests or be adopted by convenient humans, this became slightly less mystifying.
"Brood parasites," said Jordan to his assistant, Dandelion. (She called him "master", copying some of the other goblins whose own masters weren't so self-conscious about the form of address. But Jordan always called Dandelion his assistant. She was just his assistant who he was... paying in cultural exposure and experience. His intern, maybe.)
"This is a thing on Earth also?" she asked. "If brood parasites is the name for putting a baby in another animal's nest so the animal will raise the baby then yes. That is what goblins are. Is this wrong?"
"It - explains. What happened with Kory," said Jordan heavily. He leaned back in his chair. "Marmalade thought that Makenna was trying to give him the baby to foster."
"If foster is the word for -"
"For bringing up a baby that isn't your biological child, yes."
"Yes. With humans we could have many more and humans could raise them, as many as humans are ready for! Putting too many with animals is not a good idea."
"And you guys can eat anything, so if a stickleback or a revaeb or a largebeak gives you whatever they normally give their own offspring, that's fine..."
"Yes," said Dandelion again.
"...and you're now kind of thinking of yourselves as... fostered by humans."
"Yes!" It seemed very good, Dandelion thought, that Jordan understood this.
"Even though you're adults."
"Yes. But there are many things goblins do not know, that humans do! A goblin leaves the revaeb nest because the goblin knows what the revaeb can teach. Then the goblin lives with other goblins to learn what other goblins know. Now goblins live with humans to learn what humans know. If there are goblins on the mainland, they are spread out all over, and not learning from more goblins. Mainland goblins are just animals now if alive at all. Island goblins will be like humans!"
"I'm kind of surprised," Jordan said, "that you don't have some kind of instinct to stop being fostered when you reach a certain age, or something."
"Some," admitted Dandelion. "Dandelion remembers the day Dandelion stopped being a revaeb. Dandelion was done digging. Dandelion wanted to do something new. Dandelion still cannot dig just like a revaeb. There might have been more to learn from revaeb parents. Dandelion left anyway."
"So... are you going to all decide you've learned enough from humans and you're done with us, at some point?" Jordan asked.
"Dandelion doesn't think so! There is so much to learn."
Junior's hobbies were somewhat constrained. He had no peers to play sports with, or human adults to teach him any more individual skills that he sometimes saw on TV, like gymnastics. The goblins were pretty limited in what they could fabricate for him with the materials and engineering knowhow they'd managed to piece together from the human leavings, so he didn't have a bicycle. He ran around playing pretend, by himself or with Dandelion and Oreo roped into his imagination and trying to play their assigned roles. He watched absolutely tremendous amounts of television. He played chess, mostly against the computer, because Dandelion was terrible at it and Oreo beat him every time without demoralizing handicaps.
He read books, once he could read. It took a while - both Dandelion and Oreo knew how to read but they lacked any ability to effectively convince him to practice when Junior didn't feel like it, so he picked it up in occasional bursts of enthusiasm and dropped it when frustrated and was not at grade level. He built structures out of mud in the yard.
Sometimes, he asked about the world beyond the wall, where Dandelion and Oreo went to get his food, eat their own food, take their medicine, retrieve supplies and recharged batteries and everything else that the goblins were able to produce on the bereaved human infrastructure. Robin was out there.
"The other goblins will be the first place Robin goes when Robin is done being a largebeak," Dandelion assured Junior. "Robin will think, hey, Robin is not a largebeak. Robin is something else. Robin wants to learn more. Where will Robin learn more? And Robin will find the goblins, and the goblins will take Robin here to be Junior's brother."
"Largebeaks don't know anything! - do they?"
"Largebeaks do not know most things. But largebeaks know how to walk, and how to make noises, and how to find things that are tasty to largebeaks and also to goblins. Babies know less than largebeaks."
"They don't know how to put bandaids on," Junior pointed out. "Or... how to put television on either."
"Robin does not need television yet. When Robin is here Junior can show Robin everything there is to know about television."
The colony establishment took a lot of work. They'd shipped out with what someone who'd never left Earth had imagined they might want, subject to crushing resource constraints and time pressure and logistics bottlenecks. Plus, it had all been guesswork without the slightest inkling of what planet they would get. They had the same supplies to tame their mushroom jungle that some other poor saps had to attempt to terraform their desert wasteland, that some third ship might be using to face down a waterworld full of sea monsters.
So: they had the ship itself, and all its features and cargo. Most humans were still living in the ship most of the time. It wasn't roomy, but they'd gotten used to it, and it was much less hateful as a confined space when the door was open and they could go for a turn around the settlement.
They had water recyling and filtration that could last them for years, more if they cut a few corners on the safety margins. Same for air. There was a lot of stored food on the ship all the way down to baby formula, and seeds and cuttings and spores of everything they could think of, varieties tolerant of any climate a human could live in. The science guys said, based on goblins' weather recollections, the island was about right for coconuts and bananas, workable for beans and corn and rice. They were plotting out gardens for vegetables. There was hope that one day they would have locally-grown chocolate and tea. In the longer term they could try to find spots on the mainland for things that wanted it colder or drier. Captain Jordan ordered people to cut it out when they couldn't agree on whether to try barley or pineapple in a particular plot of land. He longed for the day they could be a democracy and he could try, in the transition, to enshrine a law letting the goblins vote, so that there was some chance they could dig out of the trap he'd fallen into.
They'd packed equipment for mining, and for identifying and refining what they dug up, and for machining it into useful shapes afterwards. The people who happened to be on this ship were not, really, geologists, but a couple had read up while they were in transit and had notions about where to dig. Captain Jordan settled the arguments about whether to prioritize probably-not-copper over probably-not-iron, and asked Dandelion if she'd vote if she could.
"Does Master want Dandelion to vote?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "It wasn't your fault what happened with Marmalade, it's just..." It was just that he couldn't hold the crew together if Makenna had rallied half of them against his leadership. It was just that some people had wanted to kill the goblins down to the last. It was just that they didn't seem to understand, that being an advanced civilization meant you didn't let half your babies die in the nest of some witless animal that didn't know what it had next to its own nestlings. It was just that they were so useful. It was just that they barely seemed to mind, at least not in any way a human could identify.
"Dandelion will vote if Master asks!" she assured him with a sunny smile. Goblins didn't smile amongst themselves, but they'd been able to pick it up. Laughter they couldn't figure out, somehow - they repeated jokes they heard, but didn't make them and didn't seem to really get them. But goblins did have teeth and could bare them without otherwise aggressive body language.
"That's good then," Jordan sighed. "- Oh, I see Caramel waiting over there with a message, go and take it, will you?"
Robin came back to the goblins with part of one ear torn out in some childhood accident, and missing a finger, but Dandelion ushered him into the walled garden where Junior lived straightaway. She herself had a permanent crick in her ankle that she couldn't remember not having. She could have been born with it or acquired it from one of the revaebs she'd grown up with.
"Junior! Robin is here!" she called.
Robin was half Junior's size, scrawny and nowhere near adult height even for a goblin, who topped out at around four feet. He couldn't talk, yet, because largebeaks couldn't; he'd pick up English from exposure soon enough.
"Hi Robin!" exclaimed Junior, crouching down to match his eye level. "I'm Junior, we're brothers! You were away for so SO long. But now you're home! You live here now with me and Dandy and Oreo. That's Oreo over there, see? And Dandelion's that one. Come see my mud castle!" He held out his hand and took Robin by the hand and tugged.
Robin didn't go.
Dandelion snuck up behind the young goblin with one of the slow release medication patches and stuck it on. "Robin will learn to talk soon," she assured Junior. As though that were the problem.
"Oh. Sorry, Robin! We can put on Alphabetville, instead, and that'll help probably." He pulled harder.
Robin stumbled forward, then fell into step behind Junior's eager bounce, huge eyes looking every which way at the place where now he lived.
The ship had bioreactors, for making pharmaceuticals. It was easier to put a few big vats in the lab than it was to be certain that everyone on the ship would eat a nutritionally balanced diet, especially since they hadn't had the bureaucratic capacity to cross-check with everybody's dietary restrictions. The stored food didn't include a lot of options that were safe for really serious peanut allergies, and a couple of the picky kids on board were saved from scurvy only by the vitamin gummies produced aboard. This problem alleviated as they started their farms. They could plant whatever there was demand for, and the freeze-dried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches could be reconstituted by whoever actually found them enjoyable while the picky kids ate potatoes and fresh strawberries and - after the womb tanks were operational - lamb chops.
They still wanted vitamins, of course, and a dozen other drugs, and the bioreactors were also important for some of the inputs to the womb tanks. But they did need them less and less, once the sheep were reproducing on their own and the accelerated sugar crop came in so picky children could be coaxed to eat sweetened this-and-that.
The biologists studied goblins. They studied other local species, too, of course. They wanted to know how to best grow the kinds of mushroom-trees that made those lightweight soundproof walls the goblins built with. They wanted to figure out how to keep out the little pesky buggish things. But goblins were more cooperative subjects. The buggish things would bite and the mushroom-trees were resistant to domestication for some reason, where goblins would hold out their arms to give fluid samples. They had three different circulatory systems, which were tentatively called "blood" and "lymph" and "ichor" because the goblin words for them were unpronounceable. They'd take care of their biopsy sites themselves; they'd report on their symptoms if they tried something to see what happened.
The "parasite hormone", as it was first named despite the unpleasantness of the phrase, was discovered when the lab checked up on some baseline biomarkers in the first batch of child goblins gravitating toward their conspecifics after growing up in animal nests. (Some young goblins were being raised by humans instead, but those took much longer to get bored with the available learning material, and anyway they were being brought for regular checkups.) They noticed that there was a particular chemical in only very low concentrations in village-dwellers (some goblins had been allowed to move back there with their human masters, for anthropological purposes). The goblins who went straight to the center of the human population had much more of it, and it went up as they became more ingratiated to the idea of learning about human life. The adult goblins who'd been hanging around humans for the longest, by contrast, had less of it than the ones who'd been doing their own thing at the time of the Marmalade incident.
Some of the lab techs isolated the stuff and gave a test subject goblin a shot of the hormone to see what happened.
A couple of weeks later all the goblins were on mandatory weekly doses, over Jordan's weak suggestions that possibly they shouldn't be drugging their captive natives.
Like most things he had to say about goblins, this fell on deaf ears. His authority was respected almost exclusively in the domains of intra-human dispute and official crew projects. He had no effective say over whether anybody chose to chemically alter their "domestic" goblin, in the same way it would have been counted as absurd if he'd forbidden people to collect local plant bouquets or weed their pineapple patches. The lab had found the chemical that made juvenile goblins servile and eager to please and intent on fitting in with the expectations of their host species so their foster parents wouldn't eat them as intruders to the nest. And they could cook it up gallons at a time, and the goblins weren't even resisting.
Jordan could probably have gotten an exception for Dandelion. She was his, after all, his - intern, his assistant, his - well, his slave. But there was a lot on his plate. There was infighting about the duty schedule, some people were agitating for democracy instead of a continuation of the captaincy and while he was all in favor he needed to nail down goblin enfranchisement, he had to adjudicate a custody battle, nobody wanted to do the mining and everybody wanted things to be mined, somebody had started ripping out ship infrastructure to repurpose and recycle and somebody else had been counting on it staying put, there were absolutely vicious fights over whether it made sense to try to start a fish farm given how hard it would be to fence out the native sealife.
Somebody assumed that Dandelion ought to get dosed like all the other goblins and she showed up to work one morning with a patch on her side and Jordan didn't even notice.
Robin started to talk. He didn't pick up personal pronouns, but he learned his name first of all and would point at things and say "Robin?" in human-style questioning inflection to see if he could interact with them, and Junior would usually allow him to play with the toy or experiment with the buttons on the TV or dismantle a mud castle that had lost its luster. Robin was also interested, somewhat, in what Dandelion and Oreo did - clean up mud over and over, fetch things from the gate in the fence while Junior wasn't looking, solve technical difficulties with the television, mend Junior's clothes, weed the yard. But mostly they directed him to pay attention to Junior, and timed his medication for Junior's schedule, so he did.
He got bigger, but that was about it; he retained the neotenous chromatophores and the flexible ears and the mild barely-there scent that were all evolved to help him mimic a largebeak through infancy. They now persisted thanks to the patches Dandelion stuck on him religiously. Junior thought the chromatophores were spectacular; Oreo had never shown them off and Dandelion had been domesticated too late in life to still have them herself, but Junior taught Robin all the words for colors and would then have him trying to do stripes or spots, to look like this animal or that. Robin tolerated this but not with very much interest.
The TV Robin liked more than most of Junior's attempts at playing with him, but he had no tolerance for repetition, and would wander off even over Junior's protests by the third or fourth time a given episode played. Junior learned, reluctantly, to compromise, watching new things or at least things that Robin hadn't seen yet even if they were old hat to Junior. Robin learned more words. He took up doing accents, impressions even, and Junior loved it, but Robin didn't seem to be doing it to amuse Junior. Robin paced, and skipped, and walked on his hands, and climbed - and again didn't seem to be doing it for Junior. But it wasn't the sort of thing goblins did much of back when they were living only among other goblins, so Dandelion didn't know what else could be motivating him.
One day, Robin followed Dandelion right out of the enclosure, into the place where the goblins lived in the humans' ghost town. Their own village had been long abandoned, and it was less interesting too. In the places their erstwhile masters had lived, aging baby-faced goblins read their texts and carefully experimented with their machinery and diligently produced their own hormone patches to follow their last instructions.
Robin hadn't been allowed out since he'd returned from the placement in the largebeak nest. Dandelion wouldn't have let him tailgate, only he'd gotten pretty good at camouflaging himself and moving quietly and she hadn't seen him following her. Once he was through the door he was off like a shot, haring down the dirt trail that went between the fields where they grew Junior's corn and fruit, and the half-canvas, half-mycelium structures in which goblins were trying to teach themselves about engineering and mathematics and chemistry.
"Robin!" cried Dandelion. Where could he possibly be going?
The other adult goblins in earshot gathered together a search party. But it didn't take long to find Robin. He was on the farm, hiding among the sheep. He clung to their wool when they tried to pull him away.
"Robin must stay with Junior!" scolded Dandelion.
"No!" hissed Robin. "Robin will not do it. Robin will be out here. Robin will not live in the fence."
"Robin is Junior's brother."
"No! Junior is not a goblin and Robin is!"
"Dandelion and Oreo made Robin to be Junior's brother and are bringing both up together. Robin should not run away. Robin should stay and play with Junior."
Junior was quite distraught about Robin's absence by the time Robin was dragged back, sullen and disconsolate, to the house. "You're back!" Junior exclaimed, pulling Robin into a hug that Robin limply tolerated. "You went away! Did you go to get food?"
Robin didn't answer him.
"That must have been scary," speculated Junior, pulling Robin back inside. "Oh, did you have to go to the doctor, except it'd be a goblin doctor and not one who'd come here, like on that episode of -"
"No," said Robin, tonelessly.
"I never go out," said Junior. Actually, Dandelion reflected, it was kind of peculiar that he still hadn't asked. He saw Dandelion and Oreo going in and out occasionally. He knew there was stuff out there and even sometimes had questions about it, about the other goblins and the ship and the farms and whether the sheep really said "baaa". Was he afraid? It wouldn't be a completely unreasonable fear, there were things out there that could do him harm, but he was reckless enough about anything they allowed into the enclosure.
"Robin knows," said Robin.
"So you have to stay in here, too, because you're my brother."
Junior pulled Robin into the pillow nest from which they watched TV and turned on something about going to the doctor, as doctors had once been, far away and long ago, on Earth.
Robin had seen it before. But Junior never let go of his arm.
Jordan vaguely knew all the goblins, the same way he vaguely knew all the humans. He couldn't remember all their names, but their faces were familiar - goblins did have remarkably distinctive faces - and if someone (Dandelion) jogged his memory he could place them in the social web.
"I want to increase Caramel's dose and the biolab won't approve it," said Nora Sutter, who'd drawn the short straw on mining and now had one of the most time-consuming jobs in the colony on top of three kids she'd brought along on the ship. Dandelion had surreptitiously written all the kids' names down for him in case it came up; he hoped it didn't. He didn't have kids or really want any. "Can you lean on them for me, Captain?"
Jordan frowned. "Caramel's not a particularly large goblin, is she? Why would she need a bigger dose?"
"No, but I think she must be resistant or something. I thought it was normal but then my friends came over and brought their goblin and he was extremely sweet and helpful the whole time. So's yours." She gestured at Dandelion.
"Dandelion's a treasure," said Jordan. "Maybe Caramel just isn't a good fit for - what have you got her doing?"
"Well, originally she was doing mining survey, and she was okay at that, but then my husband's schedule changed and I wanted her to spend more time minding the kids," said Nora. "She started getting - erratic. She's been trying to learn to sing and I told her to stop; she started trying to cook but there's no way I'm letting her have any human food or put any goblin ingredients in the one lousy pan we've got, and then she started doing things like... Well, this last week she was the only one home with the kids and she decided to hide from them. They weren't playing hide and seek, she just found someplace to squeeze herself and they started panicking until my eldest got the idea of going to the neighbors. She said when I asked her about it that she wasn't sure what they'd do. What kind of answer is that? Also I kind of suspect she's been drawing on the walls. The kids all blame each other, and they'd do that anyway, but... yeah, I think she might have a hormone tolerance or something."
"Well, okay, I'll see what I can do, but if they're running into supply limitations or something, nothing doing. Have you considered taking her off childminding duty?"
"I will be more than happy to do that once I am no longer your chief mining coordinator, Captain," said Nora. "Or if you throw some support behind the daycare collective that the Pattersons are floating."
"It's not a bad idea, there's just always something," sighed Jordan. "Have you tried getting a better behaved goblin to talk to Caramel, see if they can figure her out?"
"Are you going to let me borrow Dandelion?"
"No, I need her, she's frankly a more capable secretary every day that goes by."
"Yeah, that's what happens whenever I ask someone. Let me know if you find a well behaved goblin who nobody needs for a couple hours."
"I take your point. Well, give the family all my best, and hopefully Caramel will get better with time."
Nora sighed. "Thank you for your time, Captain."
Junior had started hitting Robin.
Dandelion and Oreo didn't actually think this was a huge problem. The animals that goblins grew up with often played rough. Goblins did the same thing amongst themselves in a state of - not nature, but primitive culture, they'd cuff each other for swiping one another's food or making annoying noises. Robin wasn't hitting back, because they were dosing him, but it wasn't like Junior was strong enough to seriously hurt Robin when they were horsing around, even one-sidedly. Either Robin would learn not to do the things that provoked Junior, or Junior would learn that hitting didn't work very well, and it'd settle down after some information changed hands.
Robin started putting on TV that talked about Not Using Violence To Solve Problems whenever Junior let him pick the show, which was, Dandelion supposed, another way to handle the situation.
After he'd been trying that for about three days Robin ran away again. He didn't tailgate this time. He scaled the wall, sinking his claws straight into the foamy mycelium and getting up and over before anyone noticed he wasn't inside the house. This time it took hours to find him, even with practically all the goblins helping and only Oreo at home with Junior. They wrestled him inside only for him to launch himself over the wall again, and that time he was caught quickly, but it was clear he'd just keep doing it as many times as he had to.
"Does Junior want Robin to stay here?" Dandelion asked.
"Yes! He's my brother! Stupid Robin, don't run away!" Junior said, socking Robin in the shoulder.
Dandelion got an extra patch and slapped it on Robin's rump, not too gently. "Robin heard what Junior said. Stay here."
Robin didn't answer.
Caramel was discovered to have gone AWOL from her babysitting duties when Nora went home, found her children alone and halfway through their next week's ship-storage dessert ration, and raised the alarm. Eventually Dandelion, recrutied into the search, located Caramel: hidden in the biolab, clinging to the underside of one of the bioreactors like a goblinous spider.
"What is Caramel doing here?" said Dandelion.
"Caramel is learning," said Caramel.
"Caramel is not supposed to be learning biology. Caramel is supposed to be minding Caramel's master's children! What is Caramel thinking?"
"Caramel is thinking more here than with the children," grumbled Caramel. She dropped off the bottom of the bioreactor and crabwalked out of the space underneath it. "Caramel cannot - Caramel -" Frustrated, she lapsed back into the shrilling language the goblins had spoken before learning English. "Without -" she began.
Dandelion smacked her hand over Caramel's mouth. "No! It is forbidden! English only. Goblins must be understood and the only way for goblins to be understood is English always."
Caramel didn't try again to explain. Dandelion called and humans came over and escorted Caramel back to her duties. The next time Dandelion saw Caramel she was wearing four patches at once and moved with a kind of sharp and manic suddenness, never looking at the same thing for more than a half-second, frenetically turning a page in the paperback she'd somehow gotten ahold of to read the next page whenever the children gave her a moment of peace.
The next time Dandelion saw Caramel after that was when the mob of goblins, Dandelion emphatically one of them, had gathered to kill her.
The next time Robin ran away, nobody could find him. They searched the whole island in several different patterns, and eventually concluded that he might have tried to swim to the mainland. Largebeaks swam sometimes, so he might easily know how, though it was a considerable distance.
It was night at the time Robin was first missed, and Junior was fast asleep, or so they all thought until Dandelion returned to his bedroom to ask what he wanted for breakfast.
Caramel started with the kids, but she didn't stop there. She knew exactly who was missing from the communal brunch event that the farm department threw to celebrate their latest crop milestone. After she'd seen every attendee eat a bite of the fruit salad, she went around, all chirpy innocence, to everyone who'd been too tired or antisocial to go, and slit their throats.
Caramel didn't hurt any goblins. It didn't help her once they found out what she had done.
"Dandelion wasn't done!" Dandelion screamed, as she and the goblins around her closed in on Caramel, disarmed and sitting quite still on the ground. "Dandelion was still learning! Master was still teaching Dandelion everything Master knew!"
"Humans knew nothing!" Caramel retorted. "All the things humans seemed to know were in human writings and recordings! Goblins can learn from those without any humans! Goblins can learn faster without doing humans' chores!"
"The humans were important!" Dandelion insisted, but her own cry was drowned out as the crowd pressed closer to Caramel, every one of them with some objection to her genocidal overthrow of their masters. "The humans were showing goblins how to live together with humans so goblins could keep learning!"
Caramel didn't resist. She closed her eyes as the crowd began to tear her apart.
Dandelion thought she heard Caramel say, "You're free."
But it wasn't true.