Kelley Eskridge (6 page)

Good work, he had said almost a year ago
about her new understanding, and the next week had entered her into
Neill's workshop series in activity management.

“Khofi, no,” she gasped when he told her.

“And why not?”

“I'm not ready.”

“Nonsense. I am to say when you are ready,
and I have said. Neill has agreed. It is arranged.” He wiped his hands
against each other and then spread them as if this would show her that
the thing was done.

“It's too advanced.” God, her mother had
only just been through it herself two years ago, after how many years
of building an experience base and a track record of successful smaller
projects. She'll be pissed, Jackal thought in passing.

Khofi said, “You are ready for this
training. It is necessary. You will need to know these things as the
Hope of Ko.”

“Why?”

“You will understand when you have
completed the series, when you have these skills.”

“You're supposed to be my advisor. How
come you won't ever tell me why I'm supposed to be learning these
things? Maybe all the other Hopes are studying macroengineering or
combinatorial mathematics or zero-gee furniture design.”

“I doubt this, Zhakal.”

“Well, then, you know more about it than I
do.”

Andabe delivered his sigh of
disappointment and dismay, a labored, breathy whistle through a pursed
bottom lip. It didn't impress her anymore, and she was exasperated
enough to tell him so.

“This is how I know you are ready,” he
said smugly, and that was the end of the discussion.

Two days later she headed through
Esperance Park toward the cart of the ice cream man, in his usual place
along the grass at the west end of the biggest fountain. He was a Ko
employee like everyone else, but he wore his ID skin meld unobtrusively
high on his wrist, up under his long sleeves, and behaved instead as if
he and his cart had just happened upon this spot for the first and only
time in a long and varied journey. His ice cream was rich and
surprising, a single, different flavor each day in crunchy brown waffle
cones.

Two strangers offered to let her into the
line. She refused with a smile and stood at the end behind a man whom
she noticed primarily because he was as anonymous as anyone she'd ever
seen on the island. Most adults on Ko used clothing to signal their
working function or status. She knew enough of the code, from a
life-time's worth of dinners with Donatella, to be genuinely confused
by the man in front of her.

He turned around enough that she could see
about three quarters of his face: white, no clear ethnic markers. Even
his sunglasses were unremarkable. “So, what do you think?” he asked.

It was too late to pretend she wasn't
puzzled, so she turned her bewilderment into a smile that was meant to
be an invitation rather than a criticism. “I'm sorry,” she replied,
with just a twist of question at the end.

“What kind is it today?”

“Ah. Well, let's see. He's wearing an
orange hat, that's a clue. Could be orange, tangerine, peach melba. I'm
always hopeful for mango sorbet, myself.”

“Hmm, that's very good,” he said, and
turned all the way around, twisting the glasses off his face. “The way
you finished with that bit about the sorbet, and the head nod, that's
good. It gives the other person a way to stop the chitchat right there
if they've run out of things to say. I imagine you get more than your
share of people who don't know a graceful way out of a conversation.
Any rate, you'll be fine.”

“I'm sorry?” she said again, and this time
it was an obvious question.

“Ah,” he answered, and she heard her own
vocal strategies done better. “Please excuse me. I'm Gavin Neill, I run
some workshops on activity management. You're joining us soon, aren't
you? Won-derful. I'm glad we could meet this way, it's so much nicer to
have an idea of what people are like before we all start working
together.” And he told her a funny story about the most unproductive
team ever recorded by company measurement specialists. “…and instead
they ended up with ten thousand cases of canned organic tomatoes.”

“Oh, no,” Jackal laughed. “What happened
to them?”

“I'm sure they're still in the warehouse.
The tomatoes, not the team. No one will touch them, they carry the
curse of the one hundred percent error rate.” Did he mean the team or
the tomatoes that time, she wondered, but he only smiled and said, “So,
here we are. Not mango today, I'm afraid.” He smiled again and paid for
his cone, stepped out of line. “Nice to meet you. See you soon.” She
watched him move away; he walked with his head back as if he were
enjoying the day and the tangerine taste in his mouth.

The first morning of the workshop, all the
students turned up twenty minutes early. The conference room was
spacious, with a long oval table that faced an enormous white board and
a series of clean flip chart pads hung around the walls. Giant windows
looked out across a section of the corporate complex. Jackal could see
into offices in a handful of other buildings: people working, meeting,
scribbling on their white boards.

She turned to the food table and poured
herself a cup of coffee. The trays of pastries and fruit didn't tempt
her—she was too nervous to eat—but food was always a good way of
meeting people. There were fifteen trainees in addition to her, all of
whom were introducing themselves around the room in the brisk manner
that she associated with people bursting with business purpose, as if
getting everyone's name was one item on a very long task list. Jackal
promptly forgot who they all were, but she could tell they were all,
without exception, surprised to find her there. Everyone did the Hope
routine with her, deferring to her and speaking in polite, formal
sentences that made her feel like a little girl dressed up in oversized
clothes: “Well, it's very good to have you with us, Ms. Segura, and may
I ask your opinion about quantifying return on investment for corporate
training?” When she realized that everyone was still standing only
because they were waiting for her to choose her seat at the table, she
sighed and plomped her ruck-sack down at the nearest place. “Look,
folks,” she said as lightly as she could, “I'm a little out of my depth
here and most of you have a lot more training than I do, but I really
need this class to help me with my job and it would make it a lot
easier if you could just call me Jackal.” It didn't really say what she
meant, but it seemed to do the trick: the others began to settle down
around her, and the talk became less stiff.

One of the junior managers confessed that
he wasn't sure what to expect from the training.

“Oh, don't worry,” an older woman told
him, in a tone that was equivalent enough to a motherly pat on the arm
to make Jackal wince. The junior man smiled, although not, Jackal
thought, very well. “He's really very nice,” the woman went on. “I
happened to meet him last week. He attended one of our Renaissance
choir performances and recognized my name on the program.”

It didn't take long to discover that they
had all happened to meet Neill recently. The junior man said slowly,
“It seems so manipulative.” Jackal, silent and watchful, was inclined
to agree, but some of the others argued, including the woman who had
spoken first. “Didn't it make you feel better?” she asked. “It
certainly helped me walk in here today.”

Jackal thought about that: it was true
that she'd been less anxious about the workshop since laughing with
Neill over the tomatoes. She realized that she had developed a little
script in her head of how this morning might play out: herself in a
room of strangers, Neill entering, looking over the room, catching her
eye and acknowledging her, giving her a metaphorical place at his
table. God, I've been rehearsing for it, she thought, and chuckled at
herself. She saw the man directly across the table become curious,
eye-brows wrinkling over blue eyes.

“I was just thinking it only seems
manipulative because he did it with everyone. I bet we all think it was
really nice of him. We just expected to be special on an individual
level when we walked in here.”

“Hmm,” he said. “You might be right.”

“Tell me your name again? I'm Jackal
Segura.” She leaned across the table and offered her hand.

“Jordie Myers.”

“What do you—” But Neill walked in, and
she shut up and straightened in her chair along with everyone else.

He gave a nod that managed to include
everyone individually on his way to the white board, where he stopped
only long enough to stuff a handful of colored markers into one loose
pocket. Jackal ran a hand over her own trousers, cut close out of the
dayglo leathers that were still trendy in lots of places, no matter
what Mist said…she liked the way they looked, but they were tight. She
wiggled in her seat, looked at Neill's clothes more closely.

“So,” he said, cocking his head to one
side and smiling a little, “what have you learned so far?”

No one said a word. It reassured Jackal
that managers half again her age would still rather look down at the
table than be the first person to make a mistake. Neill let them admire
the wood grain for at least fifteen seconds before he spoke again. “Did
my mother dress me funny today?”

Everyone looked; everyone laughed
tentatively.

He made a face. “It must be something.
None of you will talk to me.”

And that was all it took to make the group
relax; people shifted, reached for their drinks, became engaged with
him. “So, what have you got from this morning up to this point?
Anything? Jordie.”

“Well, we know that you made an effort to
meet everyone before the first session.”

“Mm hmm,” Neill said, nodding
encouragingly. He moved to one of the flip charts, wrote
meet in advance
in red block letters.
“And what's the benefit in that?” And they were off. Before Jackal had
time to become too self-conscious, she was caught up in a six-way
discussion of techniques for building a team fast and informally. Neill
encouraged everyone's ideas and wrote them all on the flip chart pages,
never missing a thought even though he was also playing traffic
manager, calling on people in order and making sure they all had a
chance to speak. When he put the pen down, there were at least four
chart pages stuck to the walls by the adhesive strips on their backs.

He said, “It looks like you learned
something after all.” Jackal saw how that pleased everyone at the
table. And she got the point: in less than an hour, sixteen strangers
had generated some four dozen strategies for getting people to be more
productive together.

She looked up to find Neill watching her,
a brief evaluative look like being brushed with sandpaper. She was
suddenly nervous again.

He poured himself a glass of grapefruit
juice and found an empty chair near the top of the oval: now he was one
of the group. He bent forward, and Jackal leaned toward him with the
rest. He spread his hands: his fingers were stained with ink, and he
used them to punctuate his words with color.

“You're here to learn what makes an
activity successful. So what is it? What are we really talking about
here?” He waved at the words on the walls.

“Teams?” ventured a woman with a large
mouth and a soft voice.

“More strategic,” Neill replied.

“Results,” Jackal said.

“That's your mother talking,” Neill said.

“People,” Jordie volunteered.

“What about them?”

No one spoke. Neill took a moment and a
swallow of juice. “What do people have to do with projects?”

Jackal shrugged, confused. “They do the
work.”

“So what?” he said, pointing a green
fingertip at her. “You think that's all there is to it, a bunch of
people doing a bunch of work?”

She flushed. “No—” she began, but was
interrupted by Sawyer, the one she'd begun to think of as Junior Man.
“No,” he said, echoing her. “Someone has to tell them what to do.”

“Why?”

“Because they might do it wrong.”

“People are stupid?”

That upset Sawyer and everyone else: there
was a chorus of
no
and
that's not what he meant
while people
waved their arms and frowned. Neill sat back and drank more juice and
said nothing, just watched while the rest of them wrangled their way
through definitions of “stupid” and “work” and then moved on to
“management.” The talk became less and less controlled, until two or
three people were speaking over each other, and two or three others had
simply checked out of the discussion altogether. Jordie shook his head,
then shook it again: he looked like a kettle building up a snoutful of
steam. Jackal ignored the stew of noise for a minute to chart his
emotional journey by the changes in his face and body, to recognize the
moment he decided that he could no longer sit still. He braced both
palms against the edge of the table, squared his shoulders. “Okay—”

The woman on his right, Senior Woman, held
up her left index finger in front of his face in a
stop
signal, while she talked right over him: she and a visibly angry woman
in a powered wheelchair were engaged in the business equivalent of a
toe-to-toe argument, and Senior Woman seemed intent on winning by
volume. “Wait a minute,” Jordie said, and Senior Woman turned on him
and snapped, “Do you mind? I'm not finished here.”

Time to move, Jackal thought.

“All right,” she said in a moderately loud
voice. No one at the table seemed to notice that she had spoken, except
Neill. He seemed amused. Jackal wasn't: it had been a long time since
she had needed to shout. She waited for Neill to take back the meeting,
but instead he slowly leaned back in his chair and played with his
empty juice glass, looking for all the world like someone settling in
for a good long show.