A Tiroir is a Drawer

Mindy turned around and saw who it was and her back stiffened. "Ma'am?!?"

"Red Directive. Get this semen sample to Room H, Fast. Run, don't walk. Label is, Cooper-Kat-1. Safeguard. Get a receipt, bring it to the Chorus room."

Mindy's smile was HUGE. I thought she might be offput, or think it was a hassle. She didn't, she burst out with a 'You Got it! Excellent! Thank you!'

Pulling her other backpack strap on and cinching them both down fast, she took the hockey-puck plastic case, nodded, and actually ran, like ran FAST, down the mostly-empty hallway. I heard her around a corner, yelling, 'Move, Move! Urgent!'

Kat turned to me and said, "Efficiency in action."

"We could have done that."

"Yeah, but now Mindy gets to brag, and be a part of things. And, I'm supposed to give directives every once in a while. I have to be seen to do that. Mindy's a total blabbermouth. She'll tell everyone what she did, and it's two birds with one stone."

== Chapter: Further Days ==

At this point, I have to skip forward some, since my days of libertine profligacy are nearly predictable in their almost-rote character. I'd get up and run, go to school, learn or re-learn things, make love once or twice during the school day, come home, make love with a Secondary either from school or via St. Albans' group of MILFs, do homework, and bedtime.

My nighttime-sleep partners were normally mostly girls from chorus, it seemed, since they'd gotten to sign up first for some reason. I liked having one of my Tiroirs in bed with me, too, to make sure they didn't feel I was emotionally neglecting them.

I was having a LOT of sex. One of the schoolday lovemaking sessions every day was with a condom, to ensure there were sufficient samples.

The money would be nice, I thought, plus, I was doing a useful thing for desperate people.

(In my former life, I'd heard a sermon taken from Talmud, a Jewish text, describing the relative merit of gift-giving. Person to person was least good, anonymous giver to known receiver, known giver to anonymous receiver, and anonymous givers and receivers, where results were seen or not, there was scale and relative merit to all of it. I was giving most altruistically, being anonymous, and not knowing where it was going.)

As for the money, I had no idea.

The first two samples were for $7500 each, with checks cut directly to me.

Nurse Hopper gave me a County Health Service form after the second one, for a 'Line Deposit' which was their term for direct deposit, and also asked me to name one of my Tiroirs her primary liaison, so of course I named Jane.

Jane asked me if I wanted to buy a car sometime in the next two weeks, but I said no, I could keep riding in hers if that was okay.

Coira had been talking about going back to the auto-parts store, but it turned out there was far too much to do around the house to do that. Having broad leeway as a Red, she elected to stay at home and 'help out'.

Help out? VAST understatement!

All the gifts brought as part of the Tiroir visits had to be tracked and thank-you cards written.

She had pre-printed thank-you cards that were functionally postcards and those were lots cheaper and easier (labor shortage and all). Still, I had to put a small initial at the bottom (as did each of the girls), but she handled most of it, addressing each one and mentioning the gift.

The last step was licking stamps, something she did with a wet sponge. This universe didn't have pre-adhesive postage stamp stickers yet.

As for what to do with the gifts? We didn't need that many household goods!

Father Andress helped to redistribute things to those in need, and by that time we'd driven around town enough that I could see there were a lot of places that were far less prosperous than our neighborhood.

All the girls insisted that it was Bad Form (rude, unethical) to sell Tiroir gifts. We had the choice to give them to other Tiroirs, keep them for the future, or donate them, only. The rare exception were items that had significant and singular monetary value, in which case the money was to be divided three ways - man, Tiroir(s), and children (as a trust fund).

Three weeks after I arrived, our house technically got a new (impending) member.

Rowena was the first.

She called us together (though without my parents present) and announced she'd missed and then taken a test, and sure enough, she was pregnant. Yay!!!!!

We all got up and hugged, but then Jane and Amy said they were overdue, but didn't want to get too anxious, and a test wouldn't show anything for the first two weeks anyway.

I had thought the tests were more sensitive than that, but, hey, different world, different tech.

It made me wonder how many secondaries had good luck.

The _possible_ number of those was significant.

The daily lovemaking patterns I'd settled into included the first 15 minutes of trig and history classes, after school/before dinner, immediately after getting in bed (most days), and sometimes during the night, depending if we had a backup-secondary sleeping over or if I just made love with one of my girls.

The next week brought a lot of news.

Of the Secondaries I'd made love with at the Tiroir party, "several" had come up pregnant, Nurse Hopper told me. The way she said it left no doubt that this translated to 'most'.

She wasn't empowered to name names, etc., though, given the prevalence of miscarriage in the first trimesters (especially around the 6 week mark). This was true in my world, too, though it was something just-not-spoken-of for a lot of my life.

She joked that just helping them test positive would at least buy me lunch.

We laughed together and I thought that was that.

The government's check went directly to my account, I didn't see it, but Jane brought it up, so I described Hopper's comment.

"Yeah. You should start thinking about buying a car, now. For real. Or, get mine fixed. It's been making whining noises when I turn on the defroster."

I shrugged, "Bad A/C compressor bearings, probably, I've heard it. Take it in."

Jane was confused, "How do you know that?"

"Doesn't everybody? Defrost turns on the A/C to pull moisture out."

She nodded warily, "Cars aren't... You never mentioned knowing anything about that. In fact, you said once, 'Math is better. Cars are just engineering.' So... when did you change your mind?"

I rolled my eyes, coming up with something fast. "Just something I overheard. Plus, I've been reading tons about engineering lately, picked it up."

She had been suspicious of me, and it continued with other small questions that I knew were trick questions here and there.

Time passed.

A month after that conversation, in early April, Jane wanted to know when we were going to move to Toronto.

I allowed as how we should probably go for a visit and see what the place was like. There weren't any ways of finding out stuff about Ontario without going there, really, so I asked around and we found we could rent a 'travel caravan', a 'large truck-trailer with beds' for the trip.

I didn't know if this reality had RV's, or if they called them RV's, and I hadn't seen any on the streets or parked as they always were under trees in a side yard.

Coira researched it and found out, yes, a company sold or rented them, down by the highway. They weren't nearly as prevalent or popular as my universe, probably due to the labor shortage making vacations and luxury items that much more expensive.

The next question was, when. We settled on our week-long 'spring break' week; we'd leave early and come back late.

Packed and ready, a driver dropped it off and I was blown away.

Semi-trucks looked odd on this Earth, mostly with flat fronts just like European trucks or Long-trip buses. This was basically half-again bigger than a touring bus, both in height and length, and it filled up a lane width in a way that a lot of the 1960's-style cars did, too.

Inside it was double-decker, and had 'bump-out' sections for when it was stopped that could make it 3x as wide as normal.

Whatever version she'd gotten, however much we paid, I was pretty confident it was the best possible freakin' travel trailer ever made!

(it wasn't, it turned out, but it did have far more bells and whistles than average ones).

Attached to the back, to make it even longer, was a trailer. The trailer had fold-up rear ramps and a small wall around it, and a Fiat- or Citroen-sized car.

We moved our (many) bags in, said goodbye, and drove off for our sightseeing trip.

I had a driver's license, but I was in no hurry to drive it. Coira had driven truck for the auto-parts store before, so she was our main driver.

There were no interstates.

Remembering that Eisenhower had built the Interstate system when he was president in the mid- to late 50's (which didn't happen the same way at all on this Earth), I shouldn't have been surprised.

Traffic wasn't bad, but it was far from smooth sailing.

Farm roads were good, but every small town had stoplights. There were no speed limits, but the tires weren't that good either.

So, so, so many things weren't the same, it boggled my mind.

The upstairs had sleeping quarters - queen-sized bunkbeds 3-high if you raised the roof section, plus the couches on the bottom level that could fold out to beds. A medium-sized kitchen, travel seating to watch the road go by, a small bathroom and shower, storage, we had it all. There was even a television, though not a good one.

The trailer had been built with big families in mind, and technically there was sleeping space for 16 people in beds, plus another 8 people if we pulled out couches and pulled down an extra double-sized cot from the ceiling over the driver.

Amazing stuff! It was a model of efficiency, and though the mattresses were thin they were comfortable enough.

That said, there was next to no safety built into anything. The fold-out stuff allowed for pinched fingers and normal glass instead of auto-safety glass, etc. Everything looked like it was brought to you with all the foresight of the people that made 'Lawn Darts' and 'My First Atomic Energy Chemistry Set'.

Their TV tech was right out of 1965. Some houses had color TVs but not our caravan. Those were super expensive, Jane said, in response to a 'wonder if' question that didn't indicate how clueless I was.

The place did have a record-player turntable mounted on springs, though, and a few records of classical music vintage.

Eventually we reached Detroit, which was a much smaller but healthier city than I remembered it. I say healthier as a civic measure, not as one untroubled by _nasty_ smog. There were lots more people on the street that were Black and Hispanic than I would have figured, but everyone (all races) looked about the same level of prosperity.

Most of the people walking around looked to be female. Coira was right.

My history text had said that after WW2, many southern Black families moved up north to get out of the racist culture, and Michigan had welcomed them with open arms, filling in the workforce of men that had died, and making the state much like illinois - a set of large egalitarian cities surrounded by rural and almost backwards rural areas.

To hear the gas station attendants talk (and we did stop and chat just to see wha their perspective was), the rural and urban areas were about the same white-Black mix, since many of the southern Blacks who moved up north were farmers.

We crossed the bridge to Windsor, Canada, barely fitting under the tollbooth awnings, and drove on through the thawing April Ontario countryside.

We'd been two whole days just getting there, so we stopped in a small town grocery store parking lot (with permission) and bedded down for the night.

My rhythm for making love - six times a day - was not going to still be in effect on this trip.

I did what I could to keep my girls happy, though.

The next day, it turned out there was a city in Canada called London, too. It had a stately university with a lot of giant fieldstone buildings and a shit-ton of beautiful co-eds (stupid name for female students, and somewhat misogynistic, too). We all decided this might be a good place to have as a backup, nevermind what my 'vision' had said.

By then, everyone was read-in on what my vision had foretold.

To further the effect, I'd even come up with another 'vision' that included electric cars and batteries made from lithium, of all things. I kept it to myself that the batteries in question were LNMC (nickel, manganese, and cobalt), since that could make a serious amount of money if I patented it in this universe.

Of course, it'd take serious research to push it from lab to production line - one of the things software devs know is, there's a ton of tools that make one part set things up for the next part. Electrolytes, additives, refining techniques, all that was a universe away and inaccessible. All I had was the base materials and I really hoped that'd be enough.

So, they thought my dreams/visions were oddball. I knew the future of one world, so why not mention it? I could, but it had to be carefully done.

Back on the road, we arrived in Toronto after another 3 hours, driving on wider highways than we'd seen in Michigan or illinois, so the Canadians had some kind of interest in building good highways at least.

Toronto as a city was beautiful but far, far smaller than my former Earth's. Hilly in parts and facing a sparkling Lake Ontario, it looked downtown a lot like Chicago had when we drove through there - warehouses and factories and medium-sized businesses.

Needless to say with no cold war missile fears, there was no 500 meter-tall CN tower.

As much as we were sightseeing, everyone around us stared at us, too.

Our vehicle was Just Plainly Odd. We'd all stared at it, too, when the lady drove up in it and showed us its features. Even after we had our suitcases inside, I walked around it to marvel at the swoopy sheet-metal that in my modern Earth would have been replaced by plastics.

We were there mid-afternoon, so we bought a map at a filling station (pre-pay, no credit card readers at the pump) and found the University area.

Jane had asked Amy to call them and tell them we were coming, and we supposedly had an appointment with someone in the admissions department.

What we found when we got there was... different.

A large blackboard on the porch of a grand Victorian house (the admissions department was housed there) read, "Welcome Coopers!"

Mr. Chaque (pronounced "Jack") was sitting behind a big desk as we walked inside. Amy, ahead of me, announced us, and he came out with a wide, welcoming smile, and somewhat of the kind of look you get when your presence is really, really wanted, but they don't want to say that out loud.

He offered us tea, cookies ("biscuits") and asked me what our plan was.

I spoke for us. "We're all attending - with the exception of Coira, here - a senior high school in the states. We want university degrees, preferably in some kind of engineering or tech work [what the girls had said they wanted to do, I wasn't putting words in their mouths], but we can't really pay a lot for tuition."

He looked at me oddly, "There is no tuition here. It's covered, Especially for visitors or... immigrants, possibly. Did I understand that one of you women was pregnant? Progenical Tiroir, or previously?"

Rowena said, "Progenical." They were all pregnant, only Rowena spoke up.

"Ah. Good. Well, live-in childcare is of course provided, books and fees would be waived for your family by the 'Govaern-maun du Canada'," [his French inflection showed through], "and living quarters will rate significantly more roomy if you announce an intention to seek dual citizenship or confirm wanting to remain here."

Rowena said, "I plan on staying for an extended period, at least as long as needed for our degrees, and possibly for citizenship, though we're not decided on that yet."

He rubbed his hands together, "Excellent."

Lifting his phone, he dialed (did I mention push button phones weren't a thing yet?) and said, curtly, "Chaque for Chancellor Deacon, urgent..."

He cleared his throat, aware he was speaking to us and on the phone at the same time.

"Deacon? Chaque. I have Mr. Cooper here, with the six Tiroirs I mentioned.... Yes. Residence space needed, I've got paperwork started for ... No... Yes, oui, oui, tout a fait, oui... Was thinking of maison du Frascar? ... Renovations? Another week? No, hold on."

"Will you be starting this week?"

I laughed, "Not ... quite. We have to get our stuff moved, and return our travel trailer."

He talked some more in French, then said goodbye and stood. "First, a tour? Ma'am, are you okay to walk?"

Rowena rolled her eyes, and Mr. Chaque got the message, so a tour was next.

He hadn't seen the Caravan, so we let him peek inside the door.

Touring the large campus took about an hour. We saw lots of students, mostly women in long skirts or dresses, with a few in Jeans and sweatshirts. Fashion was more formal, which was odd because on my Earth there was about Zero difference between US and Canadian clothing styles.

There were VERY few men walking about ("A-booot"), and that was something that I started counting out to figure ratios.

We ended by walking up to an ornate carved-stone formerly-residential building near the center of campus.

Two older ladies, at least in their 60's, had been sitting in a glassed-in porch. Both were dressed very formally, in more old-fashioned styles, but I didn't know why (and still don't).

They came out of the porch and down the marble stairs to greet us as we walked up their front sidewalk.

One held out her hand and said we did introductions. She added that she was the University's chancellor, and the lady next to her was, "Mrs. Schmidt".

After some chit-chat where we admittedly gushed about how pretty the architecture was and how full of students it seemed (despite being near dinnertime), Mrs. Schmidt finally spoke.

Amy had let it drop by that time that she was pregnant, too, and Chaque had just mentioned that to Schmidt.

Schmidt asked for my count and Sabine rating, which when Jane quoted them caused her to raise an eyebrow and purse her lips. I could tell she was deciding something.

Obviously settling her mind, she cleared her throat and said, "Okay then. At this point, and subject to supporting documentation from either our health-service or your USA ones, I can make an offer. I am an Immigrant Receiving Officer for the Commonwealth of Canada. Under law, offers I make are binding and I will follow them with paper. You understand?"

Amy nodded, speaking for us, though Schmidt was turning to face me.

"Sir. Mesdames. On enrollment, we are prepared to offer each and all of you a full-ride. That's room, board, tuition, fees, books, childcare via full-time live-in domestic help, and a monthly stipend for as long as you stay in Canada. Tentatively, that stipend would be $10,000 Canadian of course, or 3,000 British pounds, or about $8000 in US dollars, per semester, with two semesters per year, or three if you take summer school, with at least 12 credit hours each semester."

"For living here?"

"Yes, sir, mesdames, just for being here. It should cover incidentals. Stipends for children born here - as citizens first and as ongoing child support payments - are also available, much like the states. So, that's probably familiar - but as long as you stay in Canada, university student or not - the payments would continue. If your Tiroir permits secondaries...?"

"It does."

"...Then our Health Officer will arrange as many as you feel competent to handle, coordinate with your scheduler, and track and ensure endowed payment if progeny ensues. I believe your health officers do the same?"