Chapter 21: Come on, baby, play me something, like "Here Comes the Sun."

16 Floréal Year CCXXIV, Potat, South Windland, Libertalia - Amazonia

It was not comparative government, or political science. It was not world history, or state history, or Libertalian history. It was not current events or global politics. The course did not focus on the littles or where they came from, or the Amazons and where they were going. It was Social Studies. It was not a course for people who wanted to be taken seriously.

It was also mandatory for the ones under seven feet tall. It was Benjamin's first year teaching, and he had listened to his advisor, who told him that if he got the certificate for teaching littles, it would help him in finding a position in the university system. He had to go down a couple tiers before he found a job, but he got a foot in, and here he was. Bottom of the bottom. The least valuable member of the department and given the worst class to teach. He did not write his own syllabus or choose the textbook. The tests were pre-made, and he even had to reuse the same projector sheets. The only part he had to bring that was himself was this, here at the end of the semester, the class presentation.

Dorothy Ostrom had dressed up for this. If dressing up meant ruffles. Her dress ended just below the knee and was white with small red flowers. It was slightly too big on her arms, puffy and engulfing her. She had minimized the features of her face with makeup and let down her hair. She had worn bar shoes and let them click and clack a bit as she read from her paper, moving her legs back and forth.

Benjamin had been warned this could happen. Littles might try to get a better grade by leaning into a certain image. Put Dorothy in a diaper, give her a parasol, and she could put on a dance number in a beauty pageant. It was touching, she had gone all out for him, and also a bit disturbing littles could be manipulative in this dark way.

“Adoption expands the colonial mindset of the Amazons into the realm of sex. With the liberation of Amazon women in the workforce, the patriarchy is left with no alternative but to venture into new space. The existential crisis of the bigs in their ongoing fertility crisis manifests as a desire to control the last remaining areas of human fecundity. With the collapse of their own nuclear units, these men must instead venture into new realms to maintain their authority. Put simply, if the bigs can't have children then no one else can. Littles, and their vibrant sexuality undermines the idea of big supremacy. It symbolizes that someone smaller than them could be even more adult in the way they never will be. We fertile youths must be conquered and strapped into a diaper. This calls for radical action. We must decol...”

Her eyes stopped. She had been wiggling with her legs all morning. To Ben the disruption did not matter, everyone was getting an A in the class regardless. The class was just a participation trophy, and the littles knew it. Her dumb speech about feminist intersectional little liberation was the kind of junk food all the babies wanted school to be. They were seniors, let them have some naughty fun. Here she was now, vomiting out a combination of words and sounds, like a newborn struggling with learning language, mimicking without understanding bigger thoughts. Nothing the lady said mattered.

The look on her face was off, she flashed her white gritting teeth. She tried to begin again, bending over her stomach slightly before standing up, “We must decolonize...”

Her mouth became a frown. Her eyebrows went up. There was a loud splurt. It was not a fart, gals did not fart in public, but it was definitely audible.

“I uh...” She looked at the paper, then at Benjamin, then the paper again. He did not say anything. He stared at her, making no change of demeanor. The class was silent for a few seconds.

Cannon popped up his head from his small desk and made the only remark. “Looks like someone de-COLON-ized her pants.” He laughed annoyingly, slightly too high. Axel, his neighbor, put up his hand in a high five, which was slapped by Cannon. They both had sharp white tee shirts and long khaki shorts. Cannon had worn sunglasses to class, wearing them inside and placing them in his shirt pocket when the class started. They were still visible. Even from the back of class, Benjamin could see the dark reflection of Dorothy, as Cannon turned to brag at his sick burn of a ridicule.

“I uh... think I'm done.” Her face was red, she did not move.

Benjamin moved the full length of his body from the back of the class to his desk, taking him only seconds to reach it. Everyone was silent. Dorothy was a statue. He opened the pen drawer and then closed it, not finding what he was looking for. He checked the bottom left drawer of the desk, flipped through some folders, and then pulled a small flip book of thin white papers out.

The slips. They were seniors. They had seen the slips before. Dozens of times. This was supposed to be an easy capstone class, a freebie for the littles. Now Dorothy was done. She had been an adult less than four years and she was going back. The only sound was a sharp pen writing on the paperwork.

He walked back to the front, putting hands on Dorothy's shoulder, a gentle reassuring pat, and then moved past her to Cannon. He put the slip on the boy's desk. Cannon looked down at the paper.

Proof of Immaturity: Failure to respect the dignity of fellow man, gaining enjoyment at her suffering, while also working to enhance it by sharing the misery with fellow classmates.

The letters were big and bold, made by a hand twice as large as Cannon's own handwriting. Depending on how the next few hours went, this might be the last time Cannon would read anything ever again. For the first time in his life someone had written something about him, a review of his own performance that drilled into the heart of who he was, and it would be in his obituary. Cannon became aware of his own failure, a small lapse of judgment at a point in his life when he was himself at his worst, and a giant had seen it. He did not move from the chair. Benjamin dropped a second paper on Axel's desk.

“Why?” Axel barely mumbled. They knew. They had tried to shame another, but they did not have the right to do that. Only the Amazons were allowed to bring a little down.

“Go to the Vee-aRr's office. Look him in the eyes and explain what you did and why you deserve to still be here. He might be feeling magnanimous today.” Anouilh had a soft spot for the small ones, he would probably laugh at what Ben wrote. “Oh, and this will be on your records, if you fail to go there in a timely manner, I shouldn't have to explain what happens.” He stood back and motioned with his arms for the two to stand up. “Out you go, this classroom is for the big kids, you're not allowed to be here.”

The two men exited the room their heads down, just looking at the white slip.

Dorothy had watched the whole exchange. Her slip would be next. Her shaking led to drippings falling down her leg. The lump in her bottom was hanging between the cheeks, unable to get into the pants, but unable to be pulled and removed. She desperately needed to wipe. She needed to feel clean. She needed to die.

Benjamin turned to her and quietly, “Stay here a second. Just stand there, you're doing good.” He took her paper from her hand, her wet palms had started crunching it, and he smoothed it out, setting it on the desk. He stood to his full one hundred twenty-four inches and addressed the class.

“I'm going to let you in on a secret, since you're all in your final year. The school expects, though I'm not required, but expects about three of these to go out a semester. I was prepared this morning to go and make the case you're all grownups, that I had gotten lucky with a real mature bunch. The truth is I've just been going too easy on you guys. So...” He flipped through the slip book. “Everyone understands why I gave them their slips right?”

Nothing. No words. Fear. Terror. This class had been fun, laid back, not a real exploration of the social condition. Benjamin had been a cool young new professor who just wanted to be liked. Almost a small one like them. Now he was an enormity and a curmudgeon, beyond the need for their respect or opinion. As he spoke the course's plastic projector sheets on his desk aged into a yellow tan.

“Hmm, I thought I had taught you guys something this semester. You are all in this together. We are all in this together. You need to work together, help each other, take care of each other, and move past your weaknesses if you want to survive and thrive in this world. Axel and Cannon still need some time to learn that lesson, maybe even direct attention appropriate to their current level of development.”

Nothing, no response. Not a cough. Chairs squeaked and another drip from Dorothy's dress hit the tile floor.

“Pop quiz then. This is the only grade you will get this semester. This one question. I'm going to go through you one at a time. See if you actually learned the important lessons in your previous twenty-two years. How many of you were aware Dorothy had a problem? Well, the signs are not always obvious, I understand, many of you just want to turn your head and look away. You need to stop that. We taught you to look at the world like we do, so look at her. This is your question: What could you have done differently to help her?”

He pointed to a young man with glasses, first row, the head and body jumping back like hit with a gust of wind. The big was asking him to think in a world that did not respect his thinking. He was now responsible for his own life. Failing this class might destroy his chance of getting a degree.

“I could have told her to dress differently. I saw her this morning and thought it was funny, and I could have told her to go back and think about what she's doing.” Benjamin shrugged and pointed to the next one in line, a gal with long red hair.

“I, uh... I work in the media lab and there's a new documentary out spreading in the little student circles, but we found a bunch of hypnotics and the disc isn't properly labeled. I could have told them, but I didn't because I didn't want the Amazons to know how I found out.” Yes, Dorothy was an activist, in a half dozen student little rights organizations. She might not have been cautious, possibly even made herself a target.

And the next student, “I saw her looking at the diapers in the campus store. Just pause and stare for like twenty seconds. You don't do that. You just move past it without looking. I should have told her to go home, just get to her parents and leave campus. She wasn't right in the head. A degree isn't worth enslavement.”

On and on the littles went. Talking about what they knew, and how they failed to intervene. Each of them could have saved her. Dorothy just had to stand there, waiting, small drips oozing down her legs, the lump slowly making its way into her panties with a rancid smell making its first appearance to the class.

Benjamin finished with the last student and went to the front to address them. “I'm sorry. There was a correct answer to this question, and those weren't the ones I was looking for. I am going to have to fail the entire...”

The whole class would have broken out crying if they were not adults who had already experienced a lifetime of abuse. Failing Social Studies was a death sentence. A clear sign they were not smart enough for the world, and unworthy of a degree. No one failed Social Studies. They would be lucky if they could retake the course again next spring, but that was unlikely to be the case. The department heads would see they had failed on an easy general ed requirement, that they were not going to graduate, and quickly dump them. Maybe they could get a degree in Child Development, if they hurried and switched majors before the semester ended. More likely they would have to go out into the world having wasted four years of their lives with no certificate to show for the hard work and learning they had done. No one valued what they knew, because most of that would be irrelevant in their jobs and life to come. The world only valued the paper.

Ben was a first-year teacher, the staff would praise him for his ingenuity. He had gotten an entire class of littles to believe they had made it to the finish line, that they were going to enter the adult world, and now they were worse off than their peers of the same age-peers who had stayed home and got a real job. Worse than high school graduates, they had tried at a kind of greatness and failed. The bigs always got to have their cake and eat it too. A sniffle, some tight breathing, and a cough were the only noises in the room.

“Stop.” It was a hoarse whisper, but she was already at the center of the attention for the entire class. All the young faces and Ben turned to Dorothy.

Benjamin went to shut her down, “I'm not sure what a baby has to say anyone here cares to hear.”

“Until you kick me out of this class, I'm still a student here, and I haven't finished my presentation. For now, I'm still an adult, I'm just having the worst day of my life. You didn't ask me. I'm here, ask me what I could have done.” She had morphed, as if taller than Ben despite being just over half his height. She was immune to anything he could do to her; she had already crossed a point of no return.

Ben interest exceeded his impatience, “Go. You still have the floor.” Another drip barely avoided her shoes, darkening the tile with a splash.

“You said you need to give out three slips. You've given out two. Give me the third and spare the rest of them. We're all in this together, take me instead of them, and let them go on with their lives.”

He had never heard a little say something that mature. Not even in a movie. She was willing to sacrifice herself to save the others. It shook him out of the funk Axel and Cannon had put him into. “Everyone out. Now! Class is over.” Twenty littles stood up in coordinated fashion, soldiers obeying a drill sergeant.

Manners and sense returned to Ben next, “Please, thank Dorothy for a lovely presentation, I'll put your final scores in the system tonight. I hope to see all of you at the graduation ceremony next week.”

It was not her intelligence, her wits, her charisma, or her strength that mattered. She stood up to the big. Giving herself up to save them. Each little hugged her without words, and then left the room. They would pick up some of the stench of feces, it would linger on their clothes and skin for hours and in their minds for weeks. It was the real smell of freedom, sometimes putrid, grotesque, and earned through the sacrifice of others.

Benjamin went to his desk and laid out the changing mat, and the classroom supplied diaper and cleaning material. He carefully made space and brought the girl over. It was not his first time changing a little, but it was his first time doing it in the workplace. He threw the browned formerly white panties in the nearly empty trash next to the desk, the wet distraction joining sticky notes and chewed gum. He pushed her copy of her presentation off the ledge of the desk, and it joined the rest of the trash.

Sitting on the desk, he could lower himself down slightly and see her directly face to face. She had too much of her senses.

“You didn't see any documentary, did you?” Benjamin guessed.

“No.” She whispered it, looking down. She could not face him.

“Dorothy, this is your last time you will have a conversation as an adult. Why did you choose that topic for your speech?”

“I wanted, I felt it was something people needed to hear.” The heaviness of her decision, of the unknown future was dragging her down. Removing the facades of ego and self that divided her from the truth.

“Did they need to hear it, or did you just want to be naughty and talk about sex in a way adults can get away with? Maybe blame others for being the real perverts, while giggling on the inside. That lets you have your cake and eat it too. Pretending to have a strong big girl thought, but in reality, you wanted to go on easy mode where you're inventing new rules and accusing others of feelings they don't have. That doesn't seem like a good use of your time in my opinion. You could have used your mind for anything, not inventing imagined motivations for powers you don't understand.”

“It seemed real when I wrote it,” Dorothy's defense of herself was weak.

“Wanting things to be true doesn't make it true. You could just ask a big if it's about sex. I can tell you; this is not sexy.” He pointed to the trash can. “You could have done so much in your life, accomplished something real, and instead look where we are.”

She wanted to cry, but there were no tears. She sniffled a bit.

“Let's say you had done it. You finish your degree, well, what skills do you have to contribute to society? You know how to yell at big people to stop taking your pants away. That's not useful, so now you have to go grad school, get another chance to learn a real skill to improve yourself. You go to your dissertation, it's a room filled with men twice your height and they hear you talking about how they all want to take your sexiness away because they're infertile perverts. As if you are the one with some precious resource we just need to get at. How high minded of an opinion do you have of yourself to think that what comes out of you down below is like diamonds and oil instead of lumps of coal?”

“I don't know. I don't know what the end game was. I just assumed people would listen to me if it sounded smart and my speech was wrapped up with enough big kid words and used a rational that was clever and required some thought to defeat the logic of. Maybe they would let me get away with it because it would seem fresh even if it doesn't make sense.” She had not been prepared to defend her ideas with another grown-up. She assumed no one would listen to her. The moment any challenge emerged at all she acted like a toddler with a hand caught in the cookie jar.

“What if you were right? Huh? What if you were one hundred percent right? Do you think those men would let you get away with it then? Just go, 'yep you figured it all out, here's your doctorate. You get to join us in colonizing others. Your only hope, the only one, is that you were dead wrong about everything, and they let you pretend to be a grown up, because if you're even the slightest bit right about this, they would shut you down and diaper you on the spot.”

Her diaper rustled a little and she leaned back a bit on the changing mat.

Benjamin sighed, “It feels like you saw the writing on the wall and realized this was the best it'd ever get. It's like you set this whole thing up because you want me to adopt you.” He said it just above sarcasm, incredulous to the possibility.

Her eyes dodged to the side. Then to him, and then to the side again. She turned her head; she was done with her last adult conversation.

“Oh my God, that is true, isn't it. The young hot new professor and you're … you're... whatever you guys do.” He backed up, “I don't want this. You purposely pooped your pants in front of everyone because you wanted to force me to be your dad. No! I refuse.”

She was not aware Amazons could do that. She thought she knew everything about adoption, joining all the little groups, learning a long list of things to not do, rules she deliberately broke today. The bigs need the smalls, they cannot say no.

“Now what?” Her plan had failed. He had seen through her. She thought she was smart enough to do family planning on her own, but she was not.

He folded the slip and gave it to Dorothy, then picked her up in his arms, her face digging into his shoulder. “Dorothy, do you want to do something real with your life? Something to make your life actually have meaning and accomplishment. Something more than” his other hand grabbed the trash bag, and he pulled it up with his other hand. “More than this?”

It was what they had offered her when she started college. A chance to be something more than just an adult, someone with an education, someone who can do things. Was he going to give her another chance? Let her graduate? A strange hope swelled in her. If he was not going to adopt her, it did not make sense to turn her into a baby.

“Yes.”

Through the campus they walked, only stopping to toss the trash as they went. He carried her closely under his arms, taking her down and towards the main street that ran along the University. They weren't going to the rector's office, which was in the other direction from the history building. She knew there was a parking lot this way, so maybe she was going to go home with her new daddy. Benjamin would not give her a hint of what was happening. Instead, he took her past the cars and down the hills, until they came to a small stubby building.

She had never been here, not in four years. This was not Hilltop. She tried to turn and look at the building sign, but Benjamin's large body obscured everything. She could only see behind him to the closing doors. Bland white halls echoed their sounds as they walked along old tiles layered in black and white like a chessboard.

Benjamin turned down a hallway, she dug in closer to him, not wanting to see her doom. Was there something else a little could be other than adopted? She could tell they were descending, going deeper into the ground, beneath the college. None of her little groups had ever talked about this place. He opened a door to some subterranean room, and flipped on the lights, blinding her. In the time it took for her eyes to adjust, Benjamin put her padded bottom on a long wooden bench, fifteen feet long and four and a half feet off the ground. The room was cavernous in its height and size, easily twenty-five feet from ground to arched ceilings.

It dwarfed her, a wooden contraption seventeen feet long, built to a height of seven feet off the ground. She could not see past it or over it. Black painted wood, its polished shine distorted her and Benjamin's reflection. Before her hands were eighty-eight segmented pieces of basswood, with a thin layer of ivory above each one. Each segment had been carved two inches thick and was a foot long. As Benjamin finally released her, her crinkled underside adjusting on the smooth chair was the only noise of the empty room.

“Just do what feels right, and someone will be here shortly.” He left her without another word by closing the heavy door to the room. She would not be able to escape. The keys taunted her, like the mouth of a giant, laughing at her with logic and words that were impossible to understand.

* * *

Abby Baum knew it was a mistake to come back this semester. She was in her office, papers cluttered her desk and a florescent bulb above her flickered. In her hands was a picture frame from early in her son's adoption, his bald smiling face and chubby tummy in thick diapers, looking up at her. Her hair had not grayed yet, and she had not needed glasses. Every morning, he was there for her, blushing cheeks like the rising sun, giving her the loving push to start her day. Every evening, no matter how difficult and stressful work was, he was there, ready to hug her and tell her he loved her, as if she was responsible for bringing him the stars and the moon.

It began with slurring some words. He did not want to play with the pegos. Toys with moving parts were frustrating to him. He would not even try to solve the Tower of Hanoink, which used to be his favorite.

The doctors had said he had fallen down a plateau and would be fine once he leveled out. Instead, he got worse. He had started at three, then he was two, then one, and finally six months. He could not walk, and then, he could not crawl, at the end he could not turn or lift his head.

She got a friend in the Physiology department to do a full holographic scan of his brain. Travis had strange plaque buildup, mostly around the hippocampus. The researchers swore they had never seen it before and certainly no one knew how to cure it.

Abby did not like that answer, and she knew a disease with these symptoms would be misdiagnosed as maturosis. If it happened before an adoption, the little would quickly find themselves in diapers. For the others, many littles are often forced to pretend to be newborns. It would be impossible to know the difference.

She had no idea how common the condition was, it became a foot note in the medical journals. Something 'old' littles got if they spent too much time without a mommy or daddy to care for them. For all she knew, it could be an invisible epidemic plaguing millions.

Her chest was hurting as she touched the frame, fingers slowly moving down the glass. His feeding instinct was one of the last things to go, but eventually, Travis forgot how to eat. She had taken a month off, but it was not enough. Now at the end of the semester she was certain she would not come back in the Fall. The world had gone from blue and sunshine days to stormy clouds and black skies. Not even music, once the passion of her life, could soothe the loss. Everything reminded her of her lost son.

Brrrr. Even that note, Travis used to love pretending to play the piano at home. He even had a small keyboard that lit up and played recordings of his favorite songs, and played with it long after he stopped remembering how to make the songs himself.

Blaaang. Brr Bing Blaang. Slurrr.

Someone was in the instrument room. The semester is over, no one should be here. She composed herself, standing up, wiping her wet face, and returning her glasses to her eyes. The cleaning crew was touching the piano, they knew not to do that. She would bring herself tall and furious, she needed anger to bring those careless men down to size so they would know to never mess with the instruments ever again. Duty and fury cleared her head momentarily of sadness.

As she approached the heavy concert door, the noises grew in sound. Dur-Dee-Dum-Del-Del-Dum-Dee-Dur. Her eyes needed a second to adjust as she entered the bright room.

The piano was positioned alone in the concert hall, a hundred parents in darkened faces watching her performance. Delicate hands made their way through pieces of Bach and Mozart. Her ruffled white dress hid her, making the young pianist invisible despite the hot yellow sulfur lights and sole prominence in the center of the stage. There was only the music, and then a grand finish that continued to echo until muffled by the applause. The clapping was like a sonic boom, two hundred hands smacking themselves with the force of titans spanking a baby. The girl struggled a bit to get out of the stool, her diaper visible to the world as she picked up her dress and hopped down and bowed.

Abby shook her head, a memory of the past, or a vision of the future. She had seen Dorothy, not as she was but as she could be. For the first time in a month the sun had come out again.

The toddler stopped playing, every part of her body shook. She thought being a little just meant daycare and diapers, but perhaps it was much more than she imagined. She had entered a new world. This had been a test, to see how long she could go without touching grown-up things, and she had failed. She would be spanked. Her first day as a child again and she was going to be punished for failing to be responsible.

Abby came over next to the girl and sat down on the bench with her, “Hello. I wasn't expecting one of you here. Are you lost?”

“I was supposed to go to the rector and turn in this slip and I ended up here instead, and I don't know what I'm doing.” She handed the folded paper to the giant, who carefully unfolded it.

Proof of Immaturity: Dorothy wants to be adopted by a loving mommy or daddy.

“Dorothy, have you ever played the piano before?”

She shook her head.

“Why don't we teach you a song then, just one before we go and see the rector. Go ahead and put your fingers on 'eFf and Dee’” She took Dorothy's tiny hands and carefully guided the fingers to the correct keys. “Just press the keys down, it'll take a bit of force. You'll push these six times, and move to the adjacent ones like this, for another six. And when you get your part down, I can play the other part of the waltz on my side.”