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“Do come in, Mr Uljabaan!” Margaret Lyons fluted with pitch-perfect politeness. “What a splendid sense of timing you do have—I’ve just finished a cake.”
“Actually, it’s Katrina I was hoping to speak to,” said Uljabaan, although he came into the Lyons’ kitchen anyway. “Is she around?”
“I think she’s off working on one of her little projects,” said Margaret. Her facial expression was carefully calculated to convey that, while of course she was a supportive mother and was proud of Katrina’s creativity and initiative and the other things that had been mentioned in her school reports alongside less welcome phrases like “must learn respect for authority,” she by no means endorsed her daughter’s propensity for trying to overthrow the alien regime and, in fact, she and Uljabaan were really two tolerant adults sharing a laugh over a younger person’s follies.
Since Uljabaan had not even seen a human face until less than two years ago, a great deal of this subtlety was lost on him.
“Oh,” said Uljabaan. “Well, if she comes in would you tell her—”
At that moment, of course, the door slammed open again and Katrina came in. “Hi, Mum!” she cried, and then, “Oh. It’s you.”
“Good morning, Miss Lyons,” said Uljabaan, unruffled. “You were quite right, Margaret, about my fortuitous timing.”
Katrina glanced skeptically between her mother and the alien.
“Mr Uljabaan was saying he wanted to speak with you,” explained Margaret.
“I’ll just bet he does,” said Katrina. “I’ll be upstairs, Mum. If Lucy calls tell her I said not to hang up the posters until I’ve had a chance to check the fake blood.”
“It’s about books,” said Uljabaan quickly. Katrina froze in the doorway.
“What is it?” she said slowly. “If this is about trying to rope me into your censorship project again....”
“I would think of it more as selecting the high points of human literature,” said Uljabaan. “Also, no it isn’t. In fact it’s, er, in some ways quite the opposite.”
“What, distributing free copies of banned books?” said Katrina. “Never mind,” she added immediately, “whatever it is, I’m not doing it. We have returned to our uncompromising policy of no compromise.”
“It’s such a small thing, really,” said Uljabaan coaxingly. “The thing is, you remember I mentioned my minions inexplicably enjoyed those books you gave them?”
“That wasn’t—” said Katrina. “Oh, my goodness, really? They’ve actually formed a book club? They have, haven’t they?” she said as she saw Uljabaan’s discomfited expression. “What do you want me to do, break it up?”
“No,” he said. “I want you to lead it. As a workplace well-being initiative, and definitely not because they could overthrow me if they really tried. Because they couldn’t.”
“Well, as long as you’re sure of that,” she quipped, and then realized her mother was tracking the conversation between them like tennis, with a small smile on her face. “Also,” she added quickly, “I’m never working for you again.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for my hapless minions,” he said. “I know you want to uplift their minds.”
“I really don’t spend that much time thinking about their minds,” said Katrina, although she could already hear herself explaining the same reasoning to Lucy.
“Also,” said Uljabaan, “I will disintegrate your mother if you don’t agree to lead the discussion of Dorian Gray. And all that sort of thing.” He didn’t reach for a weapon, and Margaret just sat there, completely unfazed.
“Oh...” said Katrina, stifling profanity. “Fine. I’ll do it. For your hapless minions, not for you. Also I do know you won’t disintegrate my mother.”
Margaret nodded. “That would be terribly rude,” she said. “This will be good for you, Katrina.”
Fatalistically she replied, “It really won’t.”
The first meeting, in the village hall, went better than Katrina had expected. The Geonin minions were actually one of the more engaged groups she’d worked with, waving around their bootleg copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray, even though she could barely understand most of what they said. She’d firmly told Uljabaan that if he wanted her to consult on the book club—she had again been seduced by that word “consult”—he needn’t expect to interfere, even in the capacity of her translator. She’d had to deal with enough minions over the course of the invasion so far—pushing to the front of a queue while announcing what they needed in their urgent chatter, or interrupting her at all hours with messages from their dubious overlord—that she was certain she’d manage to work something out. And... well, they all had their books, and they appeared to have read them, and she’d led a discussion, and they seemed happy.
She congratulated herself that she’d managed to draw a few subtle, if slightly far-fetched, parallels between Dorian’s long-concealed crimes and behavior such as, say, disguising oneself as the Lord of the Manor and taking over a small village for experimental purposes. The minions didn’t actually seem to pick up on that, but you never knew.
Of course, inevitably, Uljabaan buttonholed her on her way home.
“It went well,” said Katrina firmly, and tried to hurry past. Yet, somehow, she found the two of them falling into step.
“How was it?” said Uljabaan, as if she hadn’t spoken.
Disconcerted, she answered slightly at random. “I just wish I could understand what they’re saying better. I can’t make out half of what they said, and I'm sure at least one of them said he wanted to borrow Lady Windermere's Fan and I don't know which one. Are they all ‘he,’ by the way? I should have asked.”
“Shall I tell you a secret?” said Uljabaan, leaning in slightly, and for a bizarre moment she imagined she was about to learn the salacious truth of Geonin reproductive practices. But in fact he simply whispered, “I can’t understand them either.”
She gave him a sharp glance.
“Not in this form,” he explained. “Much of the communicative power of Geonin language is located in the infrasound and ultrasound ranges. So I can’t hear it in human form.” He sighed. “It’s very lonely, Miss Lyons.”
“I hope you get to go home soon,” said Katrina, bitterly and therefore quite sincerely.
“I can’t believe you’re being a collaborator again,” snapped Lucy.
“I’m not,” insisted Katrina. “I told you, I’m working to raise the social consciousness of the minions.”
“Because Uljabaan asked you to!”
“No,” said Katrina patiently, “that was an opportunity that I cleverly exploited on behalf of the resistance.”
Lucy looked skeptical.
Katrina produced a tinfoil-wrapped package from her bag. “And I expropriated all the leftover biscuits,” she said, opening it with a flourish. “Look, the minions hardly ate any of the chocolate creams.”
Lucy relinquished the moral high ground by taking a biscuit.
It was a fine day. Of course, it was always a fine day in Cresdon Green ever since the last time Uljabaan had fiddled with the weather control. But it was a fine day, so Katrina had taken a stack of books outside to consider them in the sunshine.
Her father appeared with an armful of rocks. “What are you doing?” they asked each other at the same time.
Katrina answered first. “Preparing a book club reading selection for Uljabaan’s minions.” She sighed angrily. “What else would I be doing?”
“Not going well, then?” said Richard sympathetically.
“Not particularly.” She shut Middlemarch with a thump. “I thought I could radicalize them, but I can’t even understand them. It took me half the first meeting to figure out they were trying to say ‘portrait.’”
“That seems like quite a niche issue.”
“We were reading Dorian Gray,” she explained. “And then I tried them on Animal Farm, but we hit a roadblock quite early as they didn’t seem to know what a pig was.”
“Maybe you should try something more middle-of-the-road,” Richard suggested, bending over to stack a row of stones along the edge of a flowerbed. “You know, something everybody likes.”
“But that would miss the whole point, Dad,” said Katrina. “I’m not doing this as a favor to Uljabaan, you know.”
“Well then, how about drama?”
“Don’t we have enough drama?” she quipped.
He stood up and rubbed his back. “No, I mean make them read Shakespeare! Aloud! Then it doesn’t matter if you can understand them or not.”
“You mean because I’ll be able to follow along in the script?”
“And because no one understands it anyway,” said Richard, placing another stone.
“Dad,” said Katrina reproachfully. “Still, though... I bet it would get them really engaged with the reading. It’s important to encourage students to experience learning through a variety of modalities. And I know the perfect play!” She gathered her books and stood up.
“If you’re going inside,” said Richard a bit breathlessly, “could you ask your mother how far back she wants this rock border to go?”
Katrina decided to split the discussion of Shakespeare’s great tragedy Julius Caesar into two meetings as soon as she saw just how much the minions enjoyed performing full scenes from it. (Two whole meetings at which she didn't actually have to lead a discussion....) It was the night after the first meeting that someone threw a stone at her window.
Well, “at” was a bit of a stretch. What happened was that her father found a stone in the flowerbed the next morning, with a note tied to it, and she theorized it had been meant to hit her window but had gone wide and fallen. She quietly seethed at whoever had thought that was a good idea—how would she have mended it? Where exactly did they expect anyone, even Margaret, to find a glazier at the moment?
Richard unwrapped the note at breakfast and read it aloud with no little bemusement. “‘The Resistance needs Your Allegiance’? Was this your idea, Katrina?”
“No, Dad!” she said, annoyed. “Why would I do something like that?”
“It must have been that Lucy Alexander,” suggested Margaret. “It sounds like one of her silly ideas.”
Privately Katrina didn’t think anything that involved writing and not sleeping at night sounded like one of Lucy’s ideas, but she had a busy day ahead and she set the whole matter aside.
The next one came through the letterbox. “Remember yourself, Katrina. - A friend,” it said, leaving her none the wiser. Her best guess was that it was from Uljabaan, and that he wanted something but didn’t want to tell her what it was, and if that was so then (a) she probably didn’t want to know and (b) she’d find out in good time.
The third note was hidden in her book club copy of Julius Caesar, which cleared up a lot of things. It was written in small capitals, and it read:
“Katrina, thou sleepst. Awake, and see thyself.”
She made a beeline for the cricket pavilion, where she found Lucy on the floor in the midst of a halfhearted mess of cloth and paint.
“I didn’t even realize you read Shakespeare. What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m making protest T-shirts. What do you mean, Shakespeare?”
“I got your little notes,” said Katrina. “Don’t you think it would have been more productive to talk to me?”
“Oh!” Lucy’s face lit up with comprehension. “That Shakespeare! Yeah, I never understood it in school.”
“Didn't you?” murmured Katrina.
“Yeah,” said Lucy, “but it makes so much more sense when you hear it performed.”
Katrina was incredulous. “By the minions?”
“Yeah,” repeated Lucy dreamily. “I really felt like I got it.”
“That’s wonderful!” said Katrina, as educational policy briefly got the upper hand over frustration with Lucy. “Wait. How did you hear them at all?”
“I eavesdropped, duh,” said Lucy.
“Of course. Why did I even ask?” sighed Katrina. “But look, Lucy. Why the notes? What conspiracy did you have in mind, other than this one? If you heard it, then you must have realized that I really am selecting books with a strong resistance message.”
“Yes, I noticed that. But have the minions?”
Katrina was forced to admit that they did not seem to have changed their behavior noticeably.
“It’s no use radicalizing me, Kat.” Lucy held up a hand scarlet with fabric paint. “I’m already the most committed member of the whole resistance.”
“How about this—why don’t you come along to the next meeting?” said Katrina. “Properly. And actually inside the room. Then you can hear the rest of the play, and what the Geonin minions think about it. I’m sure it’s making them think in new ways about power and authority.”
“Okay,” said Lucy.
“Wait,” said Katrina, “is that one of my shirts?”
Katrina was, as always, on time to the book club meeting.
Lucy was five minutes late, which was practically early.
They waited another five minutes for the minions. Then ten. Then fifteen.
“Uljabaan must have realized what I was doing,” said Katrina. “I’ll probably get arrested.”
“Or he just decided he needed the minions for something else,” said Lucy.
“But I have these scripts and I even prepared discussion questions,” said Katrina sadly.
Lucy grabbed at a script. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” she said. “As long as I can be Cassius!”
Katrina did not succeed in convincing Lucy that Cassius was not the play’s hero. “He’s completely right,” Lucy said, “you’ve got to take direct action if you want anything to change. Good for him!”
"Lucy, he dies at the end."
"They all die at the end. I thought you liked Brutus. He dies too! You said that's why it's a tragedy."
"Yes, but the point is that Cassius is an extremist. He judges people in an all-or-nothing way, and he's quick to use violence as a solution."
"Good for him," repeated Lucy stubbornly.
Katrina gave up on getting Lucy to understand the subtlety of Shakespeare’s political message and the genuine conflict Brutus faces between his friendship and his country. Instead she went for the low blow: “I bet Cassius never made a mess of the cricket pavilion trying to screen-print anti-Caesar slogans on Brutus’ old toga, without knowing how to screen-print.”
“I do too know how to screen-print!” protested Lucy.
“And I bet, if he did, he would clean it up himself rather than making Brutus help.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“And I’m not stabbing Uljabaan,” Katrina clarified.
Lucy looked sulky. “You totally could, you know. He always falls for it when you say you want to help him with his stupid plans.”
Katrina smiled. “Aha, so you admit it’s a ruse on my part!”
“Fine, yes! It’s a ruse and you’re not a collaborator. But I still think you should stab him. You wouldn’t have to kill him, you know. Just make him tell us how to disable the force field.”
“No! Not that way. We have to be the bigger... beings.”
“Can we at least steal his biscuits?” Lucy said.
“Of course,” said Katrina, offering her the tray. “Look, another successful raid by the Cresdon Green Resistance.”