Dagen was well into his sixth hour of sleep when something small and warm poked his exposed arm.  In a stupor he shuffled away from the intrusion, his tired body encouraging his mind to return to its rightful place beneath the evening tides.

"Mister Dagen?"

His arm received another poke.  Still not awake, Dagen rolled away from the discomfort.  That might have gained him a few more minutes of precious sleep, had he not rolled off the edge of his bed.  Kenzine reflexes, sharp as they were, were insufficient to keep him from hitting the floor with a mighty whump.  The impact did what gentle pokes had not, and he was instantly awake.  "What?" he asked, too loudly.  He reached for his glasses and pulled them over his ears as he faced the person who'd awakened him.

Not just a person, he realized,  Victus!  Lowering his voice to a hushed whisper more appropriate for the hour, he asked, "What's wrong, Victus?"  He was a father now, he reminded himself.  This small bump was part of the journey.

"I'm awake," Victus announced.

"I see that," Dagen agreed, his usual good cheer making efforts to reassert itself upon seeing the excited look on the young hybrid's face. "And...why are you awake?" he asked, meaningfully. "It's still very dark outside."

"It's my first day of school," Victus said, earnestly. "I don't want to be late for my first day of school!"  His expression became worried. "What if they talk about dinosaurs and I'm not there?"

Dagen didn't want to smile.  He really, truly didn't, but he couldn't hold it back.  The young pup's face was so eager that he was powerless to stop.  "Okay," he agreed, "the kitchen staff won't be awake for another hour, but..." he looked around the dimly lit room, looking for something...anything to do.  Victus had taken a shower before bed, but his fur was sticking out all over where he’d slept on it.  Fluffing it out could kill off a good thirty minutes.  "You need to make sure your fur is in order, and then...we'll make sure your pens all work."

***

Four hours later, Victus had been fluffed, brushed, fed, dressed and spirited off to school, and Dagen was still blinking himself awake with the help of the blackest tea in the monastery's pantry when his comm buzzed in his pocket.  His worried frown was automatic.  Everyone he knew was aware of his schedule, and nobody called him at work unless there was something amiss. Fumbling it clear of his robes, he glanced at the display before flicking it on.  The screen showed, "Kenzine Academy", and he started worrying all over again, but for a different reason.  "Yes?"  He remembered his station and corrected, "Dagen here. Master Dagen.” He hated talking on the damned thing when he was awake, and the experience was far less pleasant when he wasn’t.  “May I help you?"

The voice was abrupt.  "The varius boy belongs to you?"

The voice coming over his comm belonged, unmistakably, to Father Uhlu.  He knew Father Uhlu well, and wasn't pleased to have to think about the man so early in the morning.  For all his vaunted reputation as a skilled educator and molder of men, the man was a prune.  Dagen pinched the bridge of his nose.  "Yes."

"Come get him."  And the line went dead.  Dagen stared at his comm in disbelief.  Part of him - a substantial part - wanted to call the man back and give him an earnest lesson in hanging up on people.  But he knew that to do so would put the man in a foul mood, and if there were conflict with Victus he wanted Uhlu to be in as good a mood as possible.

Their campus was not large, and less than two hundred steps brought him to the doorway of Uhlu's office.  Outside the office, sitting in the hall on what looked like a repurposed church pew, sat the little boy Dagen was coming to adore.  The heartbroken expression on the varius' face pulled Dagen in like a black hole.  Instead of facing Uhlu, which Dagen didn't want to do anyway, he elected to spend a few minutes sitting with his boy.   Easing down next to the uneasy looking lupine, he put an arm around his shoulder and, not saying a word, drew him close.

Victus pressed his head against Dagen's chest and wasted no time bursting into tears.  "They hate me!" he hiccuped, through his sobs. "I want to go home!"

Dagen said nothing, merely holding the shaking boy close.  He was thankful that Victus hadn't learned anything about reading emotional states yet, because he was furious.   Once the boy had calmed enough to sit quietly, Dagen got up, knelt in front of him and took the two small handpaws in his own.  "Look at me, Victus."  When the varius did not comply, he added, gently, "Please."

Victus's watery, golden eyes raised to meet Dagen's hazel ones, and he sniffed back his tears.  Dagen reached into his pocket for a tissue, but came up empty.  Once the longer noses of canine varii started to run it often took quite a while for them to stop, a fact which he knew well but had forgotten over the years.  Carrying a tissue had become second nature when he was around his school chums.  He'd have to re-learn that habit, now that Victus was in his life.  But for the moment, all he had were his robes. They could be cleaned; he turned one sleeve inside out and offered the lining to Victus.  “Blow,” he instructed.

Victus wiped his runny nose on the fabric without a second thought, and gave it a small blow when reminded to do so.  Dagen again took the small paws in his hands.  “Nothing you do and nothing they say will ever make me love you any less, Victus,” he assured his charge.  “It’s going to be all right.  We’ll just figure out what caused the problem, then stop doing it, right?”  He smiled encouragingly.

Victus nodded his head in agreement, feeling better that mister Dagen wasn’t angry at him. “He… he said there wasn’t any room for me here,” the child said, tears threatening to spill again.

“Shhh…” Dagen soothed. Knowing what Victus needed, he drew the boy close and tucked his long, fuzzy nose under his chin.  “That’s silly. There’s always room for you here, my boy!”  After a moment Vic’s breathing evened out, and Dagen retreated.  “Wait for me here, and I’ll talk to the headmaster.  We’ll have you back in class in no time!”  He smiled as reassuringly as he could, hoping that the boy’s teacher hadn’t managed to break something inside this wonderful young man on the very first day.

The door closed behind Dagen with a jarring click.  The balding pate of the headmaster rotated upward to see who had entered, saw that it was Dagen, and went right back where it had been. “Please, sit down,” the faceless scalp intoned. “Give me a moment. I’m in the middle of a thought…” Dagen resisted the urge to pluck the stylus from the man’s hand, instead sitting politely in the hard chair, hands folded neatly in his lap.   

The stylus clinked into its crystal holder, and Uhlu gave Dagen his attention.  Before he could speak, Dagen was out of the gates and running.  “I must congratulate you,” he started, in a frosty tone.  “You have turned a bright, willing student into a blubbering heap of despondency in far less time than I ever thought possible. “ He sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”

Uhlu was not impressed by Dagen’s sarcasm. “That child is not yet capable of work at this level,” he said, dryly.  “His attention span is insufficiently developed to handle the rigorous coursework we present.”  He leaned forward and rested his weight on his elbows. “We do not accept students younger than ten, Master Dagen.  You cannot expect us to train a child as young as he simply because he is your…” He paused, searching for the right word.  Coming up with nothing more accurate, he acknowledged, “Son.”  

“I was presented to the academy on Earth when I was five,” Dagen reminded him.  “Victus is eight.

“True,” Uhlu conceded, “but if I remember correctly, your parents were also Kenzine missionaries, so appropriate discipline had been a part of your life from day one.  No matter how pleasant this boy’s disposition may be, he does not possess the intellectual capacity to handle basic course work.”

Dagen was stunned.  “His academic record to date supports his ability to complete the work.”

He pointed a thumb at the room’s back wall, behind which Victus sat. “That boy is as bright as any child I’ve ever met.  I’ve introduced him to much of the third year curriculum, and even though he hadn’t heard any of it before, he learned the concepts quickly and asked meaningful questions about what we’d discussed.”

“He’s a distraction,” Uhlu shot back, “He can’t sit still long enough to take in the lecture, and he’s a significant hindrance to the others.”

“He can’t sit still?” Dagen asked, remembering the boy’s intense concentration whenever they talked. “It’s the middle of the year, Master Uhlu, and he’s coming from the tumultuous environment of a public orphanage.  Is it logical to compare him to boys who have spent the last six months immersed in the quiet contemplation of a Kenzine classroom?” Dagen spread his hands.  “He needs time to adjust.”

Master Uhlu looked at him stonily. “And what favor does this do the other ten children, who are being held back by his distractibility?”

“Distractibility?”  Puzzled, Dagen sat back in his chair. “Show me.”

Uhlu gave Dagen a sidelong glance as he reached for his keyboard.  He wasn’t used to people asking for evidence that what he said was true and he took it with a sliver of acrimony that Dagen, a man who had been a member of their little family for no more than a month, was doing so now.  He tapped out a few commands on his keyboard, then turned and looked at a vidscreen projected onto the wall behind him.  “Voice commands active,” a slightly robotic voice announced.   

“Play back video,” Uhlu said, sounding no less robotic. “Date today. Internal. Classroom fourteen. Angle four. Zoom three. Time nine hundred. Audio mute. Go.”  The system complied, and Dagen saw Victus sitting in his classroom along with the five boys sitting nearest him. He was sitting attentively, but after a few moments his head turned a few degrees to the right...then a few more...and finally he was blatantly staring at something out of the frame’s view.  After a few seconds, his mouth dropped open and he began to pant with unconscious excitement.

Suddenly, the child on the screen jumped and whipped his head around to face the front of the classroom.  Even without sound, it was obvious that he’d been reprimanded.  

Uhlu interrupted the playback. “Same parameters. Time nine hundred five. Go.”

The camera was of sufficient resolution that Dagen could see Victus’s eyes as they cut to the right before darting back to face his instructor.

“Something is tempting him,” Dagen remarked, distractedly.  “Same parameters,” he said more loudly, taking control of the monitor, “Zoom six.  Go.”   Victus’s face now filled the screen.  The two men watched as his head began to turn, then moved back to his instructor.  The cycle repeated itself several times, until temptation again won out, and his head remained turned to face...what?  

“His instructor could not hold his attention for more than a minute or two before he broke his concentration and returned to looking out the window, lost in his daydreams,” Uhlu said, “The most minor of stimuli draws his focus.” Purely for Dagen’s benefit, he added, “which is entirely expected from a child of his age.”

Dagen heard him, but was unconvinced and did not reply. “Zoom one. Go.”  As soon as the view expanded to show the entire classroom, Dagen saw what he suspected had captured his son’s attention so effectively.  A window had been opened to admit the deliciously cool morning air, and Dagen watched as a plant set near the window swayed gently, evidence of the refreshing breeze wafting inside.  Something in the boy’s expression was familiar, but Dagen couldn’t immediately place it.  On a hunch, he commanded, “Audio on. Volume four. Go.”  

A second after he’d said the words, they were bathed in the sounds of the classroom.  The instructor appeared to be delivering a lesson on the overall structure of the unified government, and Dagen was impressed that it had held the boy’s attention even as well as it had.  “Filter out the instructor’s voice. Volume eight.  Go.”    The instructor’s voice faded into the background.  Over the echoes of the man’s words, Dagen was able to pick out the distinctive, whooshing sound of a lawnmower cutting the grass outside the classroom window.

Dagen closed his eyes and sighed.  “He is in a classroom full of unfamiliar children who are as interested in learning about him as he was in them, full of new sights and smells; a classroom with an open window through which outside stimuli were pouring in, and you expect him to sit there quietly?”

“Yes,” Uhlu said, with a blunt lack of apology.  “That is what we do here.”

“Then it is time to do something different.”  Dagen said, smiling gently at his colleague.  “This is an amazing opportunity for those children to interact with a fine example of the varius species.  Having him in their lives will enrich them in ways you can not imagine until you see it in action.  He will teach them compassion, temperance, understanding, and a thousand other things that they can never learn from an instructor, and all at the expense of a few days accommodation.”  He inclined his head. “Isn’t that what we’re really trying to teach here?  Not numbers and facts and figures, but how to be better people?”

Uhlu looked uncomfortable. “How much accommodation must one make before one admits that something isn’t working?”

“The bigger question here,” Dagen said, leaning forward to emphasize his point, “is, how committed are you to doing the right thing, regardless of the cost?  No matter what other information you manage to cram into their little skulls, what those children will remember more than anything else will be how we treated the one child who needed us most.”

***

“Things are going fine, my abbot,” Dagen said, his usual joviality having long since returned. “Young Victus has settled in comfortably at the academy, and is taking to monastery life like a fish to water.”

“A fish that wants to swim at four in the morning.”

“Four and a half, maybe,” Dagen corrected.  

The abbot looked stern. “The first time, you said four.”

Dagen shrugged.  “It wasn’t relevant, so I was being concise.”

Wesley raised a reproving eyebrow. “I certainly hope your past reports have not been concise in this manner.”

Dagen looked at the other man archly.  “I’m not making a report, I’m talking to my friend.  Are you going to be my friend, or my teacher?”

“I have been your teacher for the past thirty years, Master Dagen, and so I shall always be.  It is my duty to point out your errors.” He rolled his eyes.  “However, I am also your friend, so as usual I will overlook these blatant gaps in protocol.  Still,” he said, returning to his previous tone, “I’m a little surprised he was up so early.  That sounded more like behavior I’d expect from a five year old.”

“A five year old sapiens,” Dagen said, meaningfully.  “Don’t make the mistake so many of us fall into and expect him to act like one of us.  He’s a varius, and I’m not surprised by the occasional bout of childish excitement.”  He shrugged it off, unconcerned.  “It’s totally normal, and he’s absolutely perfect,” he embellished, nettling his friend with excessive grandiosity.

“Is that so?”  Dagen’s friend drawled, looking skeptical.  “That’s not what his teachers report.”

“All of them?” Dagen asked, pointedly.

“Two of them,” the abbot replied sternly, but then smiled.  “The others think he’s the best thing since jam on toast.”

“He’s amazing,” Dagen enthused. “Had I known that fatherhood felt like this, I would have done this long ago.”

The abbot looked amused. ““If you’d done it long ago you wouldn’t have Victus, would you?”  He could see Dagen shrug on the other end of the connection. “All things in their time, my friend.”

“True enough,” Dagen admitted.  “Have I shown you pictures?”

“At least a hundred,”  Wesley said.  “Show me more.”  He leaned closer to his monitor, eager to see the holos that Dagen transmitted. “It does me good to see you so happy.”  He flipped through the pictures, giving careful attention to each.  “He’s a cute little bugger, isn’t he?”  He gave special attention to one of the holos.  “What’s this? What’s he doing in number...four seventeen?”

Dagen pulled up the picture in question and chuckled happily when the image was displayed.  “He’s being a dinosaur.  He can’t get enough of them.”

“So what made the difference?” the abbot asked, returning to their conversation. “What were we doing wrong? How can we improve?”

“It’s...complicated,” Dagen said, tactfully. “I don’t wish to disparage the abilities of my cohorts.  They are fine educators, but they sometimes miss the obvious. In this case, it was as simple as closing the window and putting him at the front of the class where he can interact with the teacher.”

“It will not always be so simple,” the abbot warned.  “That we miss such obvious things shows how far we have to go as a society before we can claim to have integrated them.  But we must,” he said.  “I have the feeling that what you are doing there is as critical to our order as any of our most compassionate missionary programs.”

The abbot’s passion made Dagen uncomfortable. “He’s only one boy. For all his differences, he’s just like any other.”

The abbot pondered the matter for a moment.  “He’s more than that,” he said, finally. “I have the feeling that his ascension through our program has more importance than you, or any of us, myself included, understand.”

Dagen sobered.  “Important for whom, Abbot?  For him?  For all of the varii?  For society as a whole?”

“I’m not certain,” Abbot Wesley admitted.  “Keep him safe, Dagen.”