Reunion

On the anniversary of my tenth term of service with the Company, my former students got together and threw me a party. How they managed it, I'll never know -- but somehow they gathered, coming from hither and yon to attend; what's more, they kept it a secret even from me, right up until the moment I entered the darkened room and toggled the light switch and nearly jumped out of my skin at their massed voices shouting, "SURPRISE!"

And it was wonderful. I'm retired from active service now: my job is to train the young -- I don't often get out into the field anymore; and for that reason, once my students achieve proficiency, I rarely see them again. At that party, however, I was surrounded by the ones I'd come to think of as my children -- and I felt at peace, content, as I rarely have in my life.

What astonished me was how glad they all were to see me. I'm not anyone's favorite teacher: I'm a taskmaster, harsh and unyielding, demanding excellence in all things. I had so often overheard my name being used as an epithet that I had long ago mastered any hurt feelings I might otherwise have felt. Every one of the beings in the function hall had spat out my name amidst a stream of curses, in their time under my tutelage -- but now, having been hardened and further educated by their time in the field, they had learned to appreciate my lessons: to appreciate me. Now, they greeted me warmly, with respect and even affection.

I did not ask about the ones who were not there. Perhaps they were simply on assignment, too far out in the field to return for something as frivolous as a party -- more likely, they were dead, victim to the foe we battled so relentlessly.

And I did not want to think about that, and be saddened, on what was otherwise so joyous a day.

I was just finishing a cup of wine when I spotted them, entering the hall. They were dressed in field gear, and suitably disheveled; I guessed that they'd just stepped off a transport after a long journey, and felt flattered that they'd gone to the trouble to attend my party. Without hesitation, I glided across the floor toward them, anxious to greet the beings who had been -- despite my steadfast refusal to admit to anything so petty as personal preference -- my favorite students.

I watched them, as I approached: saw him catch sight of me, saw his mouth curve into a grin -- and she, who had been repulsed by the sight of me at our first meetings, stepped forward to greet me; wrapped her arms around me in what their kind term a 'hug'.

Curving two of my tentacles around her shoulders, I returned the 'hug', being careful not to emit any of the pheromonal substance humans refer to as 'slime'. I extended a third tentacle to him, simulating a 'handshake', and he grasped the tip gently, being careful not to bruise. "Professor Kjkehlr," he said, in his uniquely-accented Standard, "it's good to see you again."

Laughter bubbled up within me. "Years, it's taken," I scolded him lightly, "but you've finally learned to pronounce it properly."

"More than you can do with my name," he retorted, with the old familiar hint of friendly sarcasm -- and I released his partner and wrapped my tentacles around him in a quick embrace.

We made small talk as we drifted over to the refreshments table together, and I used the opportunity to study them closely, to discern what I could from their external appearances. They had been working at their jobs, now, for nearly as long as I had been teaching; other field agents maintained a respectful distance, with expressions that approached awe. The respect was well-deserved: these two had become legendary. No other team could defeat an infiltration so comprehensively, could clean out an infestation as completely, as this pair could.

This pair, Mhldrr and Sc'ly, were easily the best damned Exterminators that the Company had ever had.

In a way, teaching them had been simpler than any others I'd guided. They'd been partners for ages when I first took over their education; they hadn't needed to be taught how to work as a unit. Nor had they needed impressed upon them the severity of the danger we faced: they'd been Exterminators on their own world, long before the Company had noticed the menace growing on the watery blue planet. They'd discerned the threat all by themselves, and had been well on their way to defeating it -- unheard of, for a primitive species: most infested worlds never noticed the danger until it had overcome them, blithely careening towards oblivion without so much as a protest.

Someone in the Company had noticed, and decided that a talent like theirs simply could not be wasted -- even if they were primitives -- and had offered them jobs. At the time, it had been a brave and daring move, fraught with risk... but that gamble had paid off, a thousand times over.

"You've done well," I told them, ignoring the tidbits they had chosen from the buffet -- what would have been perfectly delicious cubes of kzzhsh, if not for the fact that they'd been charred by fire until all the cellular membranes had been destroyed. I'd learned to tolerate the often revolting eating habits of the humans early on, just as they'd adjusted to what they considered an equally disgusting appetite on my part. It wasn't just a matter of being socially correct -- it was an essential skill. No Exterminator could properly go undercover on an infested world without the ability to blend into its populace... no matter how disgusting the physiological necessities might be.

"I heard about your work on the Outer Fringes," I continued, as they crammed food into their mouths -- a tolerable lapse of social graces: there was no species in existence that considered ship-food to be the least bit palatable, and the lengthy trip from the Fringes had to have kept their hunger sharp-edged. "Have you any idea how many field agents have tried and failed to inhibit that threat?"

"We were briefed," answered Mhldrr, carefully pretending not to see the raw kzzhsh-worm I slurped down my throat. "We saw the field reports. And still we had no idea of how bad it was, until we got there..." The taller agent looked away, eyes focusing on something only he could see. Memory, perhaps. He was good at that: his memory was almost civilized, in comparison to the inexact mental recordings of most of his species.

Even fallible human memory could retain enough of the horrors of severe infestation to bring on waking nightmares.

I watched as Sc'ly placed her hand on his arm, gently drawing him away from the memory, back to the here-and-now. Partners did that: they looked after each other, took care of each other. They had to -- no sentient being could long battle infestation without some tangible form of comfort.

A sudden pang of sadness struck me: a memory of my own partner, dear Krejhlk, dead now for longer than these two beings had been alive.

Just as quickly, I felt laughter bubble up within me again. "Do you remember," I said whimsically, "how long it took for me to get straight which of you was the female?" and we laughed together, at the memory of it. A perfectly normal mistake on my part: for most bipolar species, including my own, it was usual for the female to be larger...

"Oooh, baby, shake those tentacles," said Mhldrr, perfectly straight-faced, the other half of the old, old private joke; and Sc'ly smacked him, hard.

"You want tentacles?" she challenged him, "I'll give you tentacles," transforming her arm into an appendage much like mine, effortlessly. How well I remembered the days when the Company-bestowed morphing ability had shocked and revolted them both -- it wasn't a normal trait for their kind, after all; they'd only ever seen it in the traitor- agents masquerading as human on their homeworld. Exterminators gone bad, lured from their jobs and their ethics and their vows by the promise of power on that primitive planet... Every so often, it happened, despite the harsh reprisals the Company exacted on turncoats. Being an Exterminator was never an easy job.

Between the very small number of agents who defected, and the very large number of agents who lost their lives in the line of duty, not many Exterminators made it to retirement.

"Your time's almost up, isn't it?" I asked them -- and it was a measure of the fact that it was uppermost in their thoughts that neither of my old students took it as a non sequitur.

"We've been asked to continue for another term," Mhldrr said, earning a sharp glance from his partner -- he reached out and folded his hand around her tentacle, which she obligingly shaped back into a humanoid hand for his benefit. "We've decided to refuse," he went on, and Sc'ly relaxed, visibly.

"A good choice," I affirmed. "The Company needs all the good Exterminators it can get -- but you've done more than your share for the cause, and lived to tell about it. I give you the same advice that my own teacher gave me: get out, while you can."

"We are," said Sc'ly, "we will," and her eyes flickered to meet Mhldrr's -- the type of silent communication shared by partners, who had to be closer to each other than to any other being. Again, I felt that swift pain, the longing for my own other half, whose tentacles would never entwine with mine again...

"Where will you go," I asked, mostly to distract myself from that ache, "what will you do?"

"We thought we might go home for awhile, back to Ajerai..." How acclimated they'd become: the Standard term for their native solar system slipped effortlessly past Mhldrr's lips, where once he would have called it Earth. "It'll be nice to see it again, after all this time."

"Be careful," I warned him, "beware of culture shock -- remember, home is never the way you left it."

Mhldrr nodded. "We've seen the recordings," he averred, "we know it's changed, a lot. Still... to see a yellow star rising over a blue water horizon... it's been a long time," and didn't need to elaborate further: I knew perfectly well what it was like to want, to need to go home again, no matter how different it might have become in the interim.

"They're opening a new luxury hotel, orbiting a moon of Ajerai Six," Sc'ly reported, humor and sardonicism vying for preeminence in her tone. "We thought it might be nice to spend a few nights there, gazing out at Saturn. Considering that when we left, only a few humans had ever set foot on Earth's moon..."

"When I left my homeworld, we didn't even have television," I told her, understanding the irony of their situation completely.

"Yeah," agreed Mhldrr, "and now we can spend our evenings orbiting Phoebe," a statement that was obviously a private jest with his partner, and one I didn't understand at all.

"Be careful," I told them both. "You've come so far, you've almost finished your service, only half a term to go... don't blow it now," using a colloquialism I'd picked up from them. "Don't make any stupid mistakes, not now, when you have so much ahead of you..."

Another of those private partner-looks pass between them. "We won't," said Sc'ly.

"We've taken precautions," added Mhldrr, as if his words were part of the same sentence. Partners talk like that, when they've been together long enough.

They exchanged another glance, as if savoring the shared thought; and then she spoke aloud, for both of them. "We didn't just come here for your party," Sc'ly told me. "When we turned down a second field assignment, we were offered other positions, here at Headquarters -- and we've decided to accept."

"We're going to follow your example, Professor," Mulder finished, looking immensely pleased with himself. "We're going to stay here, and teach."

Well, well, well.

I looked at them, and remembered when I'd first met them -- scared dirtside hominids, not yet accustomed to the idea of being outside their planet's gravitational pull, much less facing creatures who looked like something they would have seen in an Earthling horror-recording, and calling them 'Professor' -- I'd been harsh with them, merciless, all the while thinking, these two will last half a term in the field, if that. And look: they'd proven me wrong. Marvelously, wonderfully wrong. They'd conquered the Black Infestation on dozens of worlds, and lived to talk about it.

And talk they would: to new generations of frightened recruits, teaching them how to survive and succeed against the pestilence that had spread its oily reach across half the galaxy.

I couldn't have been prouder, and futilely struggled for words that would tell them so -- then realized that it was profoundly unnecessary: my tentacles were flushed bright blue with emotion, in the manner of my species.

Mhldrr made a long arm -- literally: morphed his upper limb into an elastic appendage as long as he was tall -- and snagged three flasks of high-octane bhrri wine from the buffet table. He passed me one, gave the other to his partner.

"To my best students," I said softly. "Congratulations," and Sc'ly and Mhldrr nodded; we clinked our flasks together, and drank the potent drink from the sipping tubes.

And then Mhldrr raised his voice, as only an Exterminator could, utilizing the morph-ability to amplify his natural tone to one the entire hall could hear. "To Professor Kjkehlr," he called out, "the best teacher the Company ever had!"

"HAI!" echoed through the room, dozens upon dozens of voices calling out the traditional Company toast in a hundred different accents -- a brief silence, as each of them drained their flasks of whatever they happened to be drinking: and then a deafening explosion of noise, as dozens upon dozens of fragile crystalloid glasses were flung against walls and floors and shattered.

Celebrating me -- celebrating what I had given them: the skills to succeed, and survive -- and by extension, celebrating themselves.

My tentacles writhed in bright blue pleasure, and I smiled.

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