"On Children, Families, and Crises"

[Guest Fiona Weber]

Children.

 

Fiona watched the X.O.'s little progeny leave with a piece of -- nontoxic -- candy that one of the nurses or whoever had finally managed to find for her. She hadn't complained. After all, if the child really wanted to be back in Sickbay when it had a toothache from eating lots of sweets, there wasn't much Weber could to do deter her. Besides, immature humanoids never had any self-control when it came to counteracting desires for "needs of the moment". Fiona swore that even if you told a child that he would contract a terrible disease after eating a certain candy, he would still choose eat an entire container of the sweets if permitted to do so, heedless of the consequences.

 

Gods. Children. Demanding, noisy, greedy little things. It occasionally made Fiona wonder why humanity hadn't come up with some alternative method of proliferation -- or, for that matter, how there wasn't an enormous child-rearing facility off on Mars or somewhere that parents would send their little darlings until they were civilized, educated, and fully-grown.

 

She marveled at half of the parents out there, though certainly didn't envy them. It was almost inconceivable to her how people, especially those who were career Starfleet, like Kawalas or the Republic Family Robinson, managed to maintain families at all under deep-space conditions. But the human desire to spawn was very deeply engrained.

 

Frankly, Fiona was occasionally surprised that she had come into existence. The child of a career-command-track Starfleet father and a self-proclaimed "humanitarian zealot" mother working out on the frontiers of the Federation, she had never quite understood what had possessed her parents to have a child at all, especially when they did. Her father had just been promoted to being second-in-command of a tiny survey vessel, and her mother... well, that wasn't entirely fair. Her mother never dedicated any of her resources towards having a particularly luxurious vessel for herself.

 

In the end (and Weber suspected, permanently skewing her opinions on family structure), Fiona hadn't become the ship-board pet of either of her parents, instead being installed comfortably enough at the family's London townhouse under the watchful eyes of a well-paid governess and later the teachers and headmistress at an even more exorbitant private school in the heart of the city. Then again, Starfleet had become much more "family-happy" since the thirties, and she supposed it was good for the mental health of the crew to have families aboard, but then that was the standard excuse given for the accessions to family needs...

 

Weber set her just-refilled raktajino onto its proper coaster, standing and closing her office for the afternoon. For one thing, she was being retrospective, which could never be a good thing, and secondly, with Republic relatively less in the cold grip of Imminent Peril, Fiona had the chance to drop off at her quarters for some sleep and, once that was done, to start some of her pet projects again.

 

The sooner she could get such things underway, of course, the better off she would be. After all, average time before crises on this ship was just under two point two hours, and any time Republic got caught in the crossfire of one of those interplanetary situations, Fiona generally ended up not sleeping for two or three days...

[STSF_BluRox 0]

Children.

After all, if the child really wanted to be back in Sickbay when it had a toothache from eating lots of sweets, there wasn't much Weber could to do deter her.

 

This....can be blamed upon Drs. Ann Stewart and LtCdr Herel, who trained many many many of the Republic crew, that anytime they needed a sweet, that they kept jars of the most wonderful, homemade suckers on their desks. Well, actually the suckers were Herel's....Ann, well, she was the guardian of the secret still which is still, to this day, in a recessed panel in medical...for just that 'medical emergency'. So like a well trained puppy, everyone knows for a sweet....go see the Doctor! Y

 

Guess Fiona will have to start having a basket of apples or fruit! Yummy! I vote for bananas.