Page 8 of The Planetary Systems Preservation Committee Decided We Needed a Nanny

I need no more encouragement than that as he leans back, cradling me in his arms. My body and brain give in to the sleepiness and I’m out.

***

I generally wake up easily. I usually come to while I’m dreaming and have plenty of time to orient myself. I’m not typically confused or cold, but I’m both as I wake up. Alarm shoots through me, and I reach for my phone, smacking flesh instead of the nightstand. I blink awake, discovering I’m curled up on top of Lora who’s smiling down at me with a soft expression.

“Hello. You slept well,” he says, sideways blinking those deeply disturbing black eyes at me.

Well, I’m getting used to them, so they aren’t as disturbing as they were. “I don’t usually nap in the middle of the day.”

“Once every thirty Earth hours, my people begin our regenerative rest cycle. It starts with the children. Parents naturally secrete a hormone that causes their spawn to sleep. Humans appear to be susceptible to that hormone. I will need to retreat to my… coffin” —he looks confused by the use of this term— “soon. Do your people sleep in the same boxes that you bury your dead in?”

“No, of course not. Only vampires do. You’re a parent?” Embarrassment floods my cheeks as I push off of him to get up. Oh my god. He’s been treating me like a child this whole time. I—was I attracted to him? Holy shit, I was!

“Yes. Every adult ScaryDarkAlienVampire…” he stumbles for a second and distastefully says, “female you will meet has offspring. The binary terms of your language are too limiting. I am most like the male of your species, but I am a breeding male. Some males are not breeding males. We have people who are most like the females of your species, but some are breeding and some are not. Breeders are not allowed to work until we have procreated and raised our offspring to maturity,” he explains, clearly offended by the limitations of human biology. “I have raised one thousand eight hundred forty two of my offspring to maturity,” he adds with a sense of pride.

My eyes widen in disbelief. There is some kind of species gap here because, “Most humans have less than five children in their entire lives. How do you have over a thousand? How do you raise that many kids?”

Lora rattles contemplatively. “We spawn about twenty littlings every forty Earth days. It takes them thirty eight Earth days to reach maturity. I spent approximately ten Earth years breeding. Only eighteen of my littlings failed.”

“Holy shit! That’s crazy! Your kids are mature in forty days? That’s insanely fast. There must be trillions of you!”

Lora rattles a negative. “There are many billions of my species, certainly, but only one in a thousand of us are breeders. Most of my species are… drones. Your language very often is offensive, is it not?”

I grimace and shrug. “I don’t think it’s necessarily offensive to use the term ‘drone’ in reference to infertile people. I’m not sure, though. If you’re offended, then I'd call it offensive. They’re born incapable of procreating?” I have to make sure I’m understanding this right, because holy shit that is a lot of infertile people if only one in a thousand can produce offspring.

Lora rattles a negative again, baring his teeth, but he’s in thinking mode, not threatening mode. He pulls up a device from the bracer on his arm and makes the noises of language toward it. It’s not English he’s speaking, but it’s got the cadence of language. A few moments later a voice responds. It sounds like he decided to phone a friend for this discussion.

Eventually the back and forth ends, and Lora puts the device away, turning his attention back to me. With hesitant and halting speech as if he’s still learning the new words, he explains, “The imperial anthropologists tell me the best comparison for our species that you may be able to comprehend is the bees on your planet.

“I am a queen bee.” He says that with a note of disgust. “And I procreated with a new drone bee for every pod of littlings I spawned. The difference is that all of our drones are also the worker bees, and our queens are only fertile for about ten earth years. After we have fulfilled our duty, we are free to choose whatever job we would like to train for.”

“What job did you decide to train for?” I wonder why someone who can choose anything they want would want to be part of the invasion force and be part of the reeducation team? I don’t know, I’m just guessing.

“I always saw myself as a peacekeeper for my people, so I trained with that division when I finished my spawning cycle.” Something about the way he says this makes me think there was something a little… wrong with his chosen profession.

“Do a lot of the… breeding people… of your species go into peacekeeping?” It’s hard to get the terminology right when you’re dealing with a completely alien species that has a capability of being offended, and also you’re trying not to offend the one whose lap you’re sitting on because apparently you have a crush on him…

Ok, it’s me, not you, but I stand by my point and why I keep stuttering over my words.

Lora gives me a rueful smile, and my stupid little crush gets a rush of excitement that I’m asking the right questions. “No, I believe I am the only one in my generation who chose to go into peacekeeping. Most breeders choose more power lucrative positions.”

It takes me a second to think that one through. “Your government is run by breeders?”

He rattles noncommittally. “It may be a difficult concept for a human to grasp because of our biological and cultural disparities. We don’t have a government for ourselves like the government we use to take custody of planets. Most breeders become custodians of the planets we take responsibility for.” He rattles softly, thoughtfully. “When you are moved into your new housing assignment, the person who will look after your pod will likely be a breeder. You will go to them if there is an issue with your unit or if you and your neighbor need mediation. Anything that you would need outside assistance with, you will turn to your custodian for. They will provide for you as much as you require provision for.”

I stare at him for a long moment. I won’t say it aloud, but it sounds like the breeders choose more parental avenues for their careers. I’ve been out of college for seven years and out of the dorms for nine, and I’m about to be sent back to a dorm with an RA looking after me. Actually, you know what, I think Lora’s big enough to handle this. “Your breeders usually become nannies, then?”

Lora rattles thoughtfully and pats my ass since his hand is right there and apparently needs something to occupy it. “That sounds accurate enough.”

Fantastic.

“You know what? I’ve been saying humans need a nanny to make us behave for a while now. So why did you choose peacekeeping and how much of a scandal was it that a breeder didn’t go into custodian service?”

Lora laughs, shifting my world again with the sound of it. If I wasn’t sure before, I definitely am now—I have a massive crush on this ScaryDarkAlienVampire. Something is wrong with me. FYI, I have no interest in finding out what it is or fixing it.

“You are more intuitive than I expected for a human, considering the state of your planet. I make my fellow peacekeepers nervous because I am generally smaller than most people who join the peacekeepers, and they do not want to see me injured or killed, and I am snubbed by the breeders for not pursuing the same instinctive need to guide others and participating in the subtle power struggles between them.

“I was expected to take on a planetary custodial position considering the low number of my spawn that failed. I only know of two other breeders still living that had fewer spawn fail than I did. They are both planetary custodians of other planets. Other breeders expected me to campaign for the custodial governance of Earth, and most do not trust that I will not make a grab for the position. My word that I only want to be a peacekeeper will never be enough because of how successful I was at bringing my littlings to maturity. They do not believe that a breeder can have low motivation for guiding others and a high success rate for spawning.”