Let's Not Interrupt Dinner Here... but Turnabout is Fair Play

The first mirrored overlay of a pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, with the second further down

While at home on Earth, waiting for all the matters around the loss of the Farragut and the role my ship and crew played in the rescue to shake out, it was a good time to catch up on Banneker and Biles family events … on my Biles side it was a little tricky since a bunch of them struggled as much as I had to accept the loss of my father, Cody Biles, in the accident that claimed both his life and that of my mother, Khati Banneker Biles.

The thing was also touchy because the older relative nobody expected to step up actually did – Uncle Benjamin declined a promotion to commodore, retired, and took me in. It made sense because I shared a lot of scientific inclinations with him and would follow his track into the fleet as a science officer, but to my father's family it seemed as though Cody Biles was being erased.

Uncle Benjamin was and is a kind man, so diplomatic that he is an admiral who has filled in for ambassadors, but he did not play nice not when it was my life and future at stake.

“You all had three months to stop bouncing Khadijah from house to house before I could even get back to Earth. You didn't do it, so if you feel Cody's legacy is being muted, all y'all go look in the mirror and see how that happened.”

He didn't say that he was sparing them all the issues of patiently dealing with a 14-year-old girl spiraling out of control while dealing with his own grief for her mother, his sister. He didn't tell them about the daily screaming and crying and that girl using words that nobody even knew that she had learned while talking blasphemy, suicide, and murder, and about absorbing all that anger and pain, firmly establishing love and peace and order, and thus making a space for that girl, me, to heal and grow again. Uncle Benjamin did what he always does: he made it look easy, although it certainly wasn't.

But then, the big settlement came down, and as legal guardian, Uncle Benjamin got control of that money, and what did he do that for? At that point, certain of my Biles relatives, still in grief, started spiraling out of control themselves … they felt that they had everything taken from them that had once been wrapped up with my father, and this bit about the money was too much. Not that in the 23rd century anyone needs all that money; universal basic income and its blockchain update, stake-based income, is ancient news at this point. It was the principle and grief of the thing.

So, certain of my father's relatives geared up and sued my uncle for custody and the control of the settlement on one day but dropped the case on the next. What happened in between was that Uncle Benjamin walked right up to my cousin who was spearheading the suit with a tablet showing a Tgyrivan Spider feasting on its most lethal prey, the Tgyrivan Parasitic Wasp.

“I'm a scientist, so I'm going to tell you like this: you had better understand how this thing here works out before court opens tomorrow.”

Only in the early autumn of their world are the wasps flying into the webs of the spiders, and the spiders eat well on them … one can see a spider above eating two at once, their blood dripping down upon the spider's curly weaving hairs.

But little do the spiders know that this is the end of their life cycle too ...all those wasps are newly mated queens, full of viable eggs to be eaten like jewels of tasty caviar to the spiders. Most of those eggs will not survive dinner, but it only takes a few that do to reverse the game …

… because by late autumn, the spiders are dead and new young wasps are emerging from them to shelter and sleep for the winter and then get into a spring few spiders ever see!

My Biles relatives got the point: yes, they could drag Uncle Benjamin into court, but what happened after that was up to him. Wisely, they dropped the matter, and that made it possible for the healing to start between the two families after that.

Uncle Benjamin never uttered a word to me about the short-lived lawsuit that he had determined to quash for my sake, and we were at all the Biles family gatherings as if that had never even happened. It took me until age 36, discussing how one of my cousins was working toward a record for keeping the oldest pet Tgyrivan Spiders in history, for another cousin to tell me how they even learned about Tgyrivan Spiders.

When I asked Uncle Benjamin about this, he smiled slightly.

“Remember I told you in the first week of your living with me: 'With God's help, I'm not letting anything or anyone prevent you from still becoming all that you can be – I'm not letting you, I'm not letting me, and I'm not letting anyone else prevent you.' I do my best to keep my word.”

I embraced Uncle Benjamin.

“Thank you,” I said.