Conversations with a different friend

Surfer's New Paradise was aptly named.  At least if you were a surfer.  The world went under several different names depending on which chart you were looking at.  Surfer's New Paradise was the local name and the one I'd always known.  Blessed with plentiful water, it had been half sculpted by the original terraforming team into over a dozen small continents and thousands upon thousands of islands spread out into long chains covering the world's surface.  Their major industry was tourism, followed by aquaculture, followed by a mix of other light industries, agriculture, and service businesses, in a distant third, through every other, place.

While they were, officially, an Alliance world, they'd weathered the war essentially unscathed, in spite of playing host to both an Alliance and Independent presence on-world throughout the war.  There just hadn't been any fighting.  At least outside the confines of any number of beachfront bars.

Even now, the Alliance presence was hard to spot and played almost no part in local politics.  That was, of course, just how the locals liked it.  How they'd always liked it, going back as far as the colony's founding in the early days post-Exodus.  How they managed to maintain their relative independence was a standing question, left unanswered for many, many, years.

Surfer's New Paradise was also, unofficially, known as the home world of the Clan MacDude.  Or maybe officially too, if the Clan had anything official.  According to Clan legend, they were the planet's first colonists, which was actually a fact.  They'd arrived en-mass from Earth that Was aboard a privately owned and constructed, at Clan expense, Exodus Transport, which was probably a fact.  Also, supposedly, the world had been custom tailored to their needs, based on tropical sunshine, lots of beaches, and excellent surf, which may or may not have been a fact.  Their claims to have invented grass skirts and surfing were, almost certainly, an outright lie.  To this day over half the permanent inhabitants of Surfer's New Paradise could trace their ancestry back to the original colonists, and MacDude was still the most common surname - even when it wasn't actually a person's surname.

It was also home to the one person I knew, in the entire 'Verse, who came close to understanding how my little girl, Lily, was put together.

Uncle Sobi.

Sobi MacDude of the Clan MacDude.  Adopted son of Clan Kawanishi.  Surf bum.  Bartender second to none.  Fashion nightmare.  And, probably, the best biochemist in the 'Verse.

Sobi and Lady Jade had settled, more or less anyway, into a beachfront house on an island a short skimmer flight from the planet's premier University in one direction, and one of the small but advanced technical centers in the other.

I wouldn't be able to stay long, but I needed to get his take on what was happening to my little girl and whether she was in any real danger.

Lily was growing organs, probably to transplant into someone else, but how she was doing it and what the toll on her system were still unknowns.  She would risk herself if she thought she was doing right by someone.  Whether they deserved the risk or not.  Of course,  I tended to worry about her more than she worried about herself but, as her mother, that went with the job.

Sobi went over the reports I had on her condition and what she'd been doing.  Gleaned from a number of sources, some unmentionable, they were of varying accuracy and detail.  Even then, I could see his concern. When he spoke, to try and explain what he thought was happening in terms I could understand, all trace of the usual "menagerie" of accents he normally spoke with was gone, replaced by newscaster-clear Japanese, Russian, or English, sometimes in the same sentence.

"I need to see her, Kiddo.  Not enough information here to know what's going on and we may not have a lot of time if she's breaking down."

"Aren't you teaching or something?"

"Tenured professor, remember?  And I haven't taken a salary in 16 years.  They'll give me leave.  I'll get Mullis to take my classes for a couple weeks.  Just tell me where to find her."

Which I did, as best I could.  Sobi only knew a fraction of what I was doing, but I'd get him updates en-route.  The only questions whether whether he'd be able to actually get her to sit still long enough to figure out what was happening, and whether he would, in fact, be able to figure out what was happening.

A complex problem
Sometimes you need the big guns
Tenured Professor