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shining, we've got three days off. This is Arable, ever-so-muchly the most beautiful planet in the Galaxy, and you're stuck in a barn. Damn it, you're one of us!"
"Don't I know it! Let me explain this: we're growing up, Mesfun. Peer groups don't stay together for ever. "
"They all sent me in to get you. They're waiting outside."
"Tell them to go. I can fight the mudsuckin' lot of you. And far-and-away win. You know that. So please leave." That patient, exasperated tone. Mariammo withdrew.
"You're obsessed!" Mesfun shouted, and dashed his fatigues sleeve across his wet cheeks. He marched over to the heavy wooden barn doors. The metal heels of his boots resounded on the concrete. He yelled into the hard sunshine: "Come and get her! She's not coming out on her own!"

Shrieks, laughter and war whoops warned Mariammo of her peer group approaching. It sounded like all nine of them were on the raid. She carefully turned off her screen and placed it and her info disks in the wooden cupboard she had built into the barn wall. Her eyes lingered on the little image of a wild boar's head carved into the cupboard door. It was stylized but fierce. She had carved it herself. The style was similar to the birds and leaves, whittled by folk long gone, around the great doors of the barn. Then she prepared herself in her nest on top of the straw bales.
The nineteen-year-olds burst into the barn like a pack of hunting beagles, all eager, all alike, in spite of superficial differences of size, feature and gender. In their upbringing individuality was not prized. Mariammo knew herself to be the insult to the litter, the beagle who insisted on following an illicit scent while all the rest were in full cry for the fox.
Mariammo's high stack of straw bales stuck out into the great barn like a castle, taking a quarter of its area. Soon second harvest would fill the quarter beside it, so the livestock would not go short of bedding in the winter. From Mariammo's aerie the stack dropped sheer to the floor on that side, and stepped down in rows of bales to the front. The straw scratched bare limbs and tickled the nose with the smell of old summer.
The marauding pack clambered up the front and found Mariammo ready for them. Big Mao Zedong was knocked off first with a bale on the head. Mohandas got chaff in her eyes from Mariammo's arsenal and tumbled back onto Mehmet, taking them both to the floor. Agile Mitsuko got into the nest first, but he was no match for Mariammo's wrestling skills; he shrieked under an armlock so quick he didn't see how it happened, and promised to retreat, which he did honorably. Two more were in the nest now, plump Ma-Su and slow Mbweni. Mariammo grabbed them both at once and rubbed their faces in the straw. It wasn't fun. It was never fun. Why did they always have to be so shocked when their attempts to get her to join them after she had clearly said "no" generated desperate tears from her and bloody noses for them.
She had to step on slowcoach Mbweni, whose plump face was still in the straw, to throw Megumu back down the steps of bales. Then she realized Malcolm had gone to the village today and so there was

(Continued on page 8)

Children of Arable
1. Mariammo

"You're far-and-away obsessed, Mariammo! Obsessed!" Mesfun stood squarely on the barn floor, looking up at the high stack of straw bales. "Come down! Now-ish!" A handsome, brown skinned, glossily black haired young man, he held his hands severely on his hips so that they wouldn't fly about in his outrage, which his peers said made him look like a chicken. In the Arable lingo, 'now-ish' meant immediately.
Mariammo's high-cheekboned brown face peered over the edge of the topmost bales. Her short black hair rose in a jaunty quiff at the front, at odds with the hardness in her eyes and voice. "Can't you see I'm studying, Mesfun?"
" 'Can't you see I'm studying?' " Mesfun parodied her warning tone. "Mariammo, you've been studying day in day out for far-and-away ten years," he shouted, "but now you don't have to anymore!"
"Go away, Mesfun." The head drew back. "In fact, go far-and-away, since that's your favorite expression." It was one of everybody's favorite expressions on Arable, and she knew she was being mean and superior to say so, she who listened to reports from outside, where they never said 'far-and-away,' 'now-ish,' 'mudsucking', or other quaint Arable sayings in the sing-song Arable accent.
Mesfun's arms flew out from his sides. He looked like a chicken. Extreme outrage was not a feeling he was accustomed to. Everything went smoothly in his life as a rule. As it did on a thousand other planets of the Collectivity. "Come down!" he yelled, flapping in frustration.
Mariammo's face reappeared. It struck him sharply somewhere around his left-hand chest cavity that her beautiful, elegant face might be permanently marred by the belligerence her eyes had developed these last months. No - these last years. It was a thought that could never be said to another human being. He did not think about it or dwell on it, or in a moment even recall why his right hand was rubbing the left side of his slim nineteen-year-old chest.
"Listen, I have had to fight for the right to do what I want to do every week of my life since I was nine years old." This was her spelling-it-out voice: vehement and overly patient at the same time, as if he couldn't get something into his thick skull. "What makes you think I'm going to stop now? You made it hard for me. You made me hard. Got it? This is what I am." And she brandished an info disk at him, probably something on the bauxite trade, or on artificial amniotic fluid supplies for the baby labs.
"But the exams are over, Mariammo," he said. He had no idea why suddenly it was hard to see, and he wiped hard at his eyes to clear them. "We're free, it's three days to harvest, the sun is