I am at odds with my Muse.
September 6
Dr. Alfred Bester was new to the Proxima campus this year - transferred for higher salary and better benefits, not because his previous university had been less to his liking. Students were students wherever he went - loud, obnoxious, immature and generally pains in the ass. But this was his job.
The PsiCorps had raised him, educated him and trained him to be a professor at universities for Normals because he had a high IQ - there was really no other reason for it. His P-11 rating wasn’t quite high enough to qualify him as a PsiCop, but he had interned with them and was a well-trained infiltrator. No one, save for the university’s chancellor, knew why he was really here.
Any latent telepaths whose abilities had been kept hidden until now by clever parents - or simply didn’t know - usually came to light when they hit secondary education. Away from home, they weren’t prepared to put up the walls, to keep on alert. They didn’t know how to protect themselves. His job was to teach a little bit of Earth History and scour out those in the student population who had as of yet avoided detection. There were one or two like him at every institution of secondary education, teaching classes that all incoming freshmen were required to take, and the program worked quite well, pulling in a handful of latent teeps each year.
To keep his own cover, he did a passable job of educating the Normal masses - though he really could care less about them. When the telepaths came to power, a less-educated Normal population would be a more vulnerable Normal population, and that was only in his favor.
A casual scan of this group of 43 students brought out nothing of consequence, and he tried to hide his disappointment as he reached for his class roster. Oh well. He had two more sessions of this class and a whole semester to go fishing; he shouldn’t expect to hit the jackpot on the first try. “Good morning.” He glanced up, just barely, from the list of names. “I’m Dr. Alfred Bester, and this is Earth History 102, the 9:00 a.m. session scheduled to meet in this room every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If your schedule says you are supposed to be somewhere else, now would be a good time to make a graceful exit.” He paused. Several nervous pupils checked their schedules.
One got up and left.
Mundanes. He barely kept himself from shaking his head. It never fails.
“All right. Those of you who are left, let’s begin with a simple auditory response test. I say your name, you indicate to me in some fashion that you are alive and present. For the record, attendance to this class is mandatory.” I can’t keep tabs on you if you’re not here, after all. He left that part out. “I will begin each session by taking attendance; anyone missing two or more classes through the semester will be required to meet with me in person during my office hours to make up for the classes missed. Anyone missing four or more classes without a valid excuse will receive a failing grade and be required to repeat the class next term.” There were a few groans. “But if you make an effort to be here, I assure you this semester will be quick and relatively painless.” He commenced running down the list of names alphabetically, keeping his senses alert for any verbal cues a surface scan might have missed.
***
Susan Ivanova left her first college class with her head in a fog. There was something not quite right about her professor, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She felt almost as though he’d been… scanning her? It couldn’t be.
Could it?
Whatever the case, she was distracted as she crossed the quad, headed for the library in a between-class break when she heard someone shouting her name. “Susan? Susan Ivanova, is that you?”
She stopped in the middle of the quad, adjusted the pack on her shoulder and looked around, frowning. This day was getting weirder by the minute. Maybe her father had been right; maybe she wasn’t quite ready for college.
And then a man was in front of her - a male student, possibly a couple of years older than herself, and he looked vaguely familiar. “Do I… know you?”
“Michael Garibaldi. You… went to my high school.”
“I went to a lot of high schools.” She tried to push past him, but he was persistent, jumping in front of her to block her path.
“Yeah, I sort of got that impression. You were in and out of Vanguard High in less than a year.”
“And you remember me?” She said it as skeptically as possible, but he clearly did. She’d gone to Vanguard for exactly eight months her freshman year of high school before her father had yanked her out, moved again, and put her into a new school on the other side of the planet.
“I never forget a face,” he replied. And then he gave her a lopsided smile and a very cheesy little wink. “Especially one as pretty as yours.”
She shook her head and tried again to go by.
“You’d be a freshman this year, right? Are you planning on sticking around longer than you did at Vanguard? Because…” He put a firm hand on her shoulder to stop her and when she looked into his eyes, she found them both honest - and hypnotic. “OK, look. You can say no if you want to, but… I’m a member of Beta Sig, and we’ve got our rush kick-off party Friday night. If you’re new on campus, it’ll help you meet people and… maybe… if you don’t find anyone else worth talking to… maybe you’ll talk to me. We can catch up.” She wasn’t sure why, but she no longer felt the need to get away. He was smiling at her fully now, warm and welcoming and dropping the act, and she couldn’t deny she definitely could use a few friends. She’d never been in one place long enough to make good friends; for all she knew she’d gone to school at one point or another with half the students on this campus. Michael Garibaldi was the first to have recognized her.
“I’ll think about it.” God, why can’t I look away from those eyes? “What time?”
“Starts at eight. Bring a friend.”
“I’ll… do that.” A too-long silence slipped by. Susan caught it, recovered and averted her eyes for the first time since they’d locked her gaze, breaking the spell. “I have to go.”
Now he let her by, but she heard him call out, “See you Friday!”
Susan didn’t respond.
She didn’t go to the library, either. She changed her plan and went back to her dorm room instead, figuring it would be a bit better for clearing her head. She walked slowly across campus, feeling the fog lift from her mind the further she got from Dr. Bester’s classroom. By the time she keyed in her entry code at the front door of her dorm and the door hissed open to let her in, she had almost entirely shrugged off all the weird feelings and was instead finding her thoughts preoccupied by a pair of hypnotic blue eyes.
“Susan. I did not think you would be back until this afternoon.”
Susan smiled at her roommate as she entered. Delenn was seated on her bed, cross-legged with an e-reader in her lap and a personal computer open to her right side. She was all right - a little weird, though. As Susan understood it, she was one of only a handful of alien-Human hybrids - a Minbari mother, a Human father. But then, Susan had enough secrets and strange quirks to fill a book; she was in no position to play judge and jury with a girl as perfectly nice as Delenn. “I needed to clear my head, and the library just wasn’t the place.” She dumped her backpack unceremoniously on the bed opposite the one Delenn occupied and jumped down to sit beside the bag.
Delenn looked up from her book and nodded in understanding. “How was your first class?”
Susan hesitated, feeling the weirdness, the fog from earlier creep back over her. “OK,” she responded at last. “Do you have any classes with Dr. Bester? History teacher,” she elaborated in explanation.
“I do not think so. With so much of my life spent on Minbar, my advisor thought it best to postpone the Earth History requirement until next term, after I had spent some time among Humans and had time to prepare.”
Susan studied her roommate for a long moment. Her mother would’ve called Delenn an “odd duck.” Susan saw something else. She seemed afraid of her own shadow at times - lost, alone in a large, unfamiliar world, and Susan took pity on her. She had resolved within ten minutes of their first meeting that she would take Delenn under her wing, teach her how to survive on Earth - should she choose to stay after graduation. That was a long ways away. “On my way back here I ran into someone who remembered me from high school.”
“Oh?” A polite inquiry, riding in on a curious smile.
“Yeah. He, uh, invited me to a party Friday night. Said I should bring a friend.” This was invitation enough for Susan, but clearly her roommate’s understanding of a polite invite was different. She would need to be more explicit. “You should come.”
Delenn shied away at that, blushing and turning back to her reader. “My father warned me about Human college parties. I do not think it would be a good idea for me to go.”
“Why not?” A long silence. Delenn’s attention appeared to be on her studies, but nearly two minutes passed and she didn’t prompt the reader to move on or take a single note. The lost, lonely expression Susan had observed often over the past few days appeared again, settling itself into Delenn’s unique features until it seemed to take over her whole body. Susan softened. “Delenn… what is it?”
“I…” The Minbari woman sighed. “From what I have observed of the young males of your species, they are not especially mature. In class, they are held in check by an instructor. In a social setting, they are free to do as they wish and I…”
“You’re afraid they’ll make fun of you,” Susan supplied, her heart going out to the woman seated on the opposite bed. She’d been “the new kid” enough times to know what Delenn was feeling, at least a little. “I think it would be good for you to go,” she offered, her tone considerably softer. “You’ll see they’re not as bad as you think. You’re here to learn, right? Consider this another learning experience, a chance to see the young Human male in his natural environment. And… to be perfectly honest, I’d like to go, but I’m not sure I can do it alone.”
Delenn brightened at that, lifting her eyes to meet Susan’s. Hope made them sparkle a most mysterious grey color. “OK.” It was barely a whisper. “I’ll go.”