New stand alone short – “A Mother’s Son”

A Mother’s Son

By

Mackey Chandler

            Theodore looked out the narrow port of the ballistic express and watched the glare of the sun disappear behind the curve of the earth. He’d be on the ground six hours before it managed to catch up. He took another sip of champagne and his implant scrolled a message in his corneal display warning him his blood alcohol was at .016. If he had another glass he’d be turned away at customs and refused entry to the Caliphate. It was irritating to have his AI in nanny mode but safer when he was working. Some people hardly show any signs they had been drinking at that blood alcohol level, but Ted knew he had little capacity for alcohol and would be pulled aside for testing. His clients would bump his per diem back if he had to sit in customs until he dried out or even worse get stuffed back in another flight and not be able to pin down the source of the rumor he was tracking. He’d even get stuck with paying his round trip fare if he was sent back.

His clients spent big money on rumor futures and trend insurance. Especially terror and organized crime futures. The street talk was about a genotype targeted infertility plague that would cost five figures in ransom for the antitreatment, or six figures plus if they refused to pay and had to reverse engineer and counteract it themselves. Three of his clients were in active pharmaceuticals, and one was a protection mob that didn’t want some upstart horning in on the limited market for medical ransoms. Corps only budgeted so much for employee protection before they saw direct action as being the better long term investment. Given two adversarial deals they were as likely to spend their discretionary funds on wiping out the older threat they knew better than the new threat that would require research. Ted looked at the odds of that happening and discretely shifted some of his personal investment out of medical coercions and into natural disaster futures from behind several proxies.

The weather and volcanic activity had been on a flat trend for nine years and he figured it was time for a upswing. When he plotted it against historic cycles and sunspot activity he was even more convinced, even though his assessment was contrarian.  That’s where you made the real money; bucking the herd and being right when you did so. He took a small sip of the Champagne making it last if he couldn’t have a refill. There were no alerts popping up, but he checked zinc futures in depth and his bets on the Super Bowl. Zinc was sweet and he still had faith in the Packers. At least enough not to throw the bet away on a buy back. All that took less than thirty seconds so he still had almost five thousand long seconds to fill with something before his flight touched down in Manama.

Tomorrow was his four hundredth birthday, and he was feeling sorry for himself. He was making it just fine day to day. If he stopped working right now he projected he could retire for another hundred years, probability ± 12%, before he had to work again. Trouble was, in a hundred years all his skills and knowledge would be obsolete if he didn’t stay on the treadmill. He’d have to find a new line of work or take a downgraded retirement like his mother. Once you did that almost nobody ever came back to the real world. It wasn’t that he was burned out. Far from it. If anything he was bored. Last time he’d taken vacation he’d come back to work after three days before he went nuts. Sitting on the beach, watching the surf with his link down he’d lasted as long as it took to suck down one Margarita before he  started running extrapolations on his implant to predict the pattern of short and high waves. He hadn’t tried really cutting himself off completely – shutting not only his link, but also his implant for about twenty years. Last time the sensory deprivation had unnerved him so badly he’d taken several days to recover from the experience.

If he didn’t want to retire and wasn’t unhappy with his work what did he want? What would make him happy? It had to be a challenge and he suspected it had to be soon, or he would succumb to the primary source of morbidity in today’s population – suicide. He’d seen enough agents and traders who should have been happy falter just a bit to where you thought they were just down for a couple days, and then you’d hear they were gone.

Perhaps he should have taken Sandra up on it when she proposed to him. He checked memory – one hundred seventeen days since she’d broached the subject and he thought about it every day. He’d said no quickly, but that hadn’t put her off dating him. They’d spent a two day together just a week ago. If she was seeing – or pursuing – anyone else he saw no evidence of it. He talked to her pretty much daily. He talked to several hundred people a day normally, keeping networks alive, but she was different. He didn’t need to talk to her and took time anyway.

His immediate thought at her offer was they didn’t have enough in common. Not enough for a life together. They’d never share the same work. He’d met her in the diorama club. Most everybody collected something, and with the trend for professionals to invest in large houses, how well your collection was displayed was as important as the pieces themselves. You needed to fill the empty rooms with something or it looked silly.

He primarily collected tools and displayed them in a twentieth century home workshop. She collected turn of the twenty first century home appliances and kitchen items and displayed them in a 1998 home kitchen. They both had museum quality displays that had won prizes. Maybe that wasn’t enough upon which to base a life on together, but even her job was interesting when it was her explaining it. He’d never had any interest in the law before meeting her. Pretty much everything he’d done with her had been fun because he was doing it with her.     Maybe her offer could be renegotiated… Ted thought of her contact code and let the link form through ship com. He expected vision and sound but got text messaging…

LawyerShark:  Hi Ted

TeddieBeah:  I miss you Sandy

LawyerShark:  Rough day?

TeddieBeah:   No more than usual – but I’m asking myself some serious questions…

LawyerShark:   Work?

TeddieBeah:   No – yes – maybe – personal life more – I’m not happy.

LawyerShark:   I’ve known that for awhile

TeddieBeah:   Do you miss me?

LawyerShark:  A little – but we’re not joined at the hip  : )

TeddieBeah:   You offered something more permanent.

LawyerShark: Yes – you didn’t think long before saying no…

TeddieBeah:   I’ve been regretting that – because I have been thinking about it every day. Is there a reason you went to text? Bad hair day? (evil grin)

LawyerShark:   I’m on the Moon. The trans. delay drives me nuts with real time video. I’d show you how much I miss you if you were here.  ; )

TeddieBeah:  LOL – safe to say from a million miles away…

LawyerShark:  The Moon is closer than that.

TeddieBeah:  Always with the legal precision – call it poetic license.

LawyerShark:  U R a snoop not a poet.

TeddieBeah:   Hot job? You didn’t say anything about a lunar trip last week

LawyerShark:   Hot enough to pay 3x for a direct lift ticket instead of an orbital transfer. More than that is too hot to put in an IM.

TeddieBeah:   Your job is more exciting than mine. Dinner when you get back?

LawyerShark:   Maybe….Are you considering a counter-proposal?

TeddieBeah:   More like a hostile takeover…..

LawyerShark:   I’ll think about it too. Maybe a limited contract? Five year – no kids?

TeddieBeah:   Renewable if both agree?

LawyerShark:   Any contract can be renewed if both agree…YOU might want to change the terms before five years – one year to start maybe

TeddieBeah:   Dinner  when you are back and talk about it if you still want to then?

LawyerShark:   Back to Toronto in two days – mid-day Thursday.

TeddieBeah:   Back to Atlanta tomorrow – Meet Harrington’s on the Chesapeake for dinner?

LawyerShark:   Reserve a room – two day maybe? –  and a sailboat if the weather is fair?

TeddieBeah:   Yes and yes – I’m clear to do that. Bye then – rip into them Shark…

LawyerShark:   Don’t worry – there will be blood in the water – bye………

A thought closed the link and he stared out the window not really looking at the scarce splashes of light on the dark planet below. It was the high Asian plains so there was still little to shine into the night sky. He was thrilled at the idea of marrying Sandra and scared to death at the same time. He’d been married once in his first century and even in the fog of time distance he still remembered it had been bad. He’d been very young and stupid, and his mother had been hard on the girl giving her hell at every turn.

He’d tried to explain to her that his mother had never approved of him either, but she saw every slight as a battle to be drawn out and won. Sandy wouldn’t put up with it. She’d give her some hell right back. Ted learned even before leaving home as a young man to simply ignore his mother’s complaints and go ahead like nothing had been said. Four centuries later it still worked. At least now he’d learned enough to ration her to one call a week.  His brother Harold had tried to explain the sheer necessity of that to him for almost a century before he adopted the practice.     Harold had a family and his mother would have them in a constant uproar if she called daily – or  more. He had only himself to be put in an uproar, and felt obligated to take her calls for years. Finally his doctor had laid down the law and protested he could not counter the anxiety the woman produced, not even with drugs. When faced with being pushed into an early rejuv he couldn’t afford he finally got a spine.

Now if she called again the same week he refused the call. It had only taken a few hundred tries before she realized he, the good son, meant it just like Harold. She still was simmering over the time last century he had visited Triton to write a series on their mining industry. She honestly had no clue why they could not just chat back and forth normally at that distance. He’d given up trying to explain it. Damn sure she wasn’t going to give Sandy a hard time or he’d cut her down to a call a month – see if he wouldn’t. In four centuries almost anyone can manage to grow up. Even a mama’s boy.

There was a slight feeling of dislocation, an almost unperceivable tug forward that made Ted look out the port. There was a faint golden glow standing away from  slight flare of the lifting body shape. He pulled his harness he had never taken off nice and snug. If anything happened it probably would be of no use, but old habits are hard to break. Finally there was a soft chime and the cabin crew announced what he had already noted – that they were in approach for Manama. He wore long sleeves and an embroidered hat in respect of local sensibilities.

He accessed his translator service and made sure he had the latest local slang, names in the news and current events for the district of  Bahrain and the Greater Caliphate. He looked enough like the locals to fit in well. He’d had his hair and moustache trimmed in the local style, and his white shirt was sewn with the proper shape of collar and double front pockets with plaits currently in style. He carried his documents and a few other necessary items in a small belt purse instead of a western wallet. Not that he was going to try to pass for a local. He just wanted to be as little off-putting as possible. They would know he was a North American as soon as he opened his mouth, but at least they might not tag him as Jewish and as an investigator so easily.

* * *

            The medical supply firm which he approached in Manama, supposedly to buy a compact gene sequencer should pay it’s sensitive people more. Fifty thousand EuroMarks and a ticket to Yemen had been sufficient to get a copy of their customer list going back six months. The young woman who supplied the list had called in sick the next morning and plead a family emergency was taking her home. It should take her employers several days to figure she wasn’t coming back. Yemen was conveniently beyond her employers ability to summon her if her male relatives forbade her to return. By the time they had any desire to really press the point they’d have greater concerns.

The one address on the customer list which stood out was a user of agricultural equipment, not medical devices and systems. That had been the smoking gun he was looking for. Other investigators were already pursuing that anomaly and Ted was done with this case and speeding home, still headed west by a coincidence of available connections, losing a day to circumnavigation, which would cut into his per diem. That was ok, in his work that averaged out.

* * *

            Sandra wore tailored tan pants in the current loose style, with scarlet piping along the seams and edges. A safari jacket with a padded shooting shoulder showed a matching scarlet lining at the collar and cuffs. Not only unusually modest, but it had enough body he suspected it was armor. A wise precaution considering some of the places she traveled. She enjoyed explaining the padded shoulder’s function and seeing people’s discomfort. But she didn’t constantly try to tweak him, just the majority of the so mundane public she regarded as fools. The host at Harrington’s remembered them although it had been at least a year since they’d been in. Even if it was just hospitality software he appreciated being remembered. They declined companionship and entertainment and accepted a table in the public area. Both of them enjoyed the feeling of being in a group even if they didn’t want the adventure of meeting strangers tonight. They had entirely too much of a private nature to discuss.

The scallops were marvelous, faintly browned on the edges, with just a hint of Sherry. The fireplace near their table was real, not simulated. Every once in a while a waiter would add a piece of wood so the reality of the extravagance was not lost on anyone. Ted skipped the wine after a few sips wanting his faculties for the proposal. Sandra had it recorked and sent to their room after the entree.

Ted plowed ahead with his proposal, wanting to resolve it so he could either enjoy the rest of their date or wallow in his misery. It seemed to amuse Sandra and she accepted his proposal for a year, signing it electronically with an almost absent minded indifference before they even had dessert. By the time they retired to their room the court had recognized their contract and they were man and wife. He would have carried her across the threshold, but she declined teasing he would hurt himself or bang her head on the doorway. If she wasn’t a traditionalist it still felt like a honeymoon.

They both traveled so much in their work it didn’t matter which home they favored. Both of their homes were investments and they determined to keep and use both of them, rendezvousing in whichever was handy to meet. A few more changes of clothing and some toiletries were all the move either needed.

* * *

            Next week, Ted was in Singapore, Sandra was off somewhere in secret. What he didn’t know he couldn’t accidentally divulge. Business over for the day he was looking forward to his mother’s weekly call. Usually it was strained. He’d try to tell her in a simplified way she could understand what he was doing in his profession. Even though they got video and the extravagance of printed out news papers at her retirement community he could tell she didn’t really understand what he told her. In her mind governments still told corporations what to do, and hazard futures were immoral because you were betting that bad things would happen, and profit from them if they did. He’d tried to point out death insurance let you profit from a predictable bad thing with little effect. At least this time he’d have good news to tell her about marrying Sandra. He was sure she’d disapprove of some detail, probably that she had not taken his name, or keeping both houses. She disapproved of his massive house for one person before. She was proud of the fact she was content with four hundred cubic meters, and didn’t see why one person needed any more. The fact she had no ground or air car, no need to entertain large groups, no hobbies that required room, and the retirement village served all her meals didn’t matter. Her unit did have the luxury of a snack kitchen where she could prepare pop corn or even sandwiches if she didn’t want them delivered from the community kitchen. She had an exaggerated idea of the independence this gave her.

He was relaxed in his hotel, soft music playing when she called. The picture that came up was just flat not a holo. He wondered if her phone died if she could even buy another 2D now. The people at her retirement village were such fossils some probably used audio only.

“Where are you Teddy?” He could see her examining his background, looking for clues. She still had glasses, not trusting any surgeon to ‘mess with her eyes’, and refusing the modern deep rejuv that would alter basic genetic defects instead of just rewinding the clock. Ted wondered if they still made butterfly glasses with rhinestones or if those were the same pair she’d had forever.

“What does it matter Momma? My number connects you to me wherever I am. I’m in Singapore tonight. In a hotel room that could be in New York or Berlin. They’re all the same.”

“Traveling is not good for you. You never eat properly traveling. I hope you have some prunes or something to keep your bowels moving.”

“Believe me Momma, if the hotel didn’t serve safe nutritious food they’d be out of business in a week. It isn’t like the old days when you were growing up. You can’t hide anything like that today. I check to see if there are any complaints on the net before I even make a reservation. And they have a beautiful gym. I swam laps this morning before I had breakfast and went out for business.”

“I called on your birthday last week but I couldn’t get through.”

“Did you leave a message for me?” Ted gently prodded.

“You know I don’t talk to a machine. I’m your mother not a phone salesman. You should take an extra message on special days.”

“Yes Momma, taking a deep breath and staying calm, but I remember when Harold let you call special days too. You called everything on the calendar. The high holidays and the new year, the legal holidays and the commercial ones like grandparent’s day. My God Momma, we’re Jewish and you called on St Patrick’s day, Valentine’s day and Christmas!”

“It don’t hurt to fit in,” she protested. “That’s why I named you boys like I did. There are too many won’t give you the time of day if your name sounds Jewish. I was being practical.”

Ted wanted to tell her that was out of date too. Here in North America it almost was, but last week in the Caliphate it would have been worth his life to wander around the back streets marked as a Jew.

“Momma I have some good news that will make you happy,” he said, ignoring the previous argument.  “Sandra asked me some time ago to marry her and after some thought I brought the idea up again last week and she accepted.”

Ted could hear the deep sigh clearly. “Is she a nice Jewish girl Teddy?”

“Well, I don’t know Mamma. We never talked about religion. I’m not sure if she has any strong religious opinions at all. What does it matter Momma? I haven’t seen the inside of a synagogue for a couple hundred years myself.”

“It matters to me. And I wonder what sort of a wedding you will have. Do you think I want to go in some church and see you married with a big cross hanging behind a preacher?”

“Momma, we’re already married. She affirmed my contract and registered it with the court before we were even done with dinner. We never considered having a big formal ceremony and inviting people.”

“That’s not married,” her face went into that mask he knew too well meant she didn’t approve. “That’s a business merger.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I thought you’d be happy for me.” Ted decided now was not the time to tell her it was a one year renewable contract.

“Is she from a good family? Are they people of substance or did she marry you for your money?” she asked suspiciously.

“The financial part of our agreement says we keep our financial affairs separate. That’s what most couples do now Mamma. I have no idea how much she makes, but she has made partner in a very well regarded law firm. Most firms pay their partners well and add a bonus of fifty or sixty million a year for even the newest partners.” Ted knew that would sound like a lot of money to his mother. “She has a beautiful home in Toronto nicer than mine, and a small flat on the moon. We are keeping both houses. I don’t know much about her parents except they are younger than you. She is only in her second century and they were only in their fifties when they had her. They retired early too. They live in Armstrong.”

“That’s the moon, isn’t it?”

“Yes Momma. The sector that lives under American law.”

“But she’s Canadian?”

“I…I don’t know Momma. I’m not sure where she was born. She might have multiple citizenship or declared herself extraterritorial. A lot of lawyers do that so they can’t be accused of bias. It doesn’t matter much unless you are living off  negative income tax.”  That was a sensitive subject because his mother’s savings had not kept up with inflation, and she was more and more dependent on the distribution.

“Whatever,” Momma said in slang mode that was almost four centuries out of date. Every year her usage got further from the main stream so he was almost translating their conversation to understand it. “So when can I meet your new wife?”

Ted kicked himself for not anticipating this. He imagined she’d want to screen her, but not ask for a physical visit. Maybe he could manage her away from the idea…

“She’s working Momma. I don’t even know where because her current assignment is a secret. She should be done in just a few days and when we are together again I’d have her screen…er, call you.” That would cost him an extra call, which she’d try to keep asking for once he yielded a bit, but better than a trip.

“A call is not like seeing someone face to face. Are you ashamed to have her see your mother? Are you afraid I’ll be old fashioned and embarrass you?”

Yes, he thought, but didn’t dare voice it. The way med-tech was going they could both be around another four hundred years, and if he had kids she could get a court order for visitation more generous than anything he wanted to grant. He had no desire to emigrate to the outer system to avoid her. He liked living on a planet with skies and real gravity.

“You know traveling doesn’t agree with you,” he reminded her. “If you’d only let me get you a decent holophone. You can’t tell the image from the real thing.”

“You can’t hug a holo. Besides, I want to see how this girl lives and what sort of person she is to take care of my son.”

He bit off telling her he could take care of himself just fine and he didn’t marry her to take care of him. It would have been wasted. It had been sixty years since he’d taken her outside her retirement village. The last time he’d taken her on public transportation and she’d asked out loud  in her booming voice, “What the hell kind of freak is that?” when she saw a gene altered gentleman. She had to have seen them on TV, but maybe she thought they were special effects not real. The judge although noting such behavior was the norm when she was a youngster, and that she choose to be isolated in her period retirement home, had fined her fifty thousand dollars and told her not to come out in public if she didn’t learn what was acceptable behavior. Ted was sure it didn’t mean anything to her because she never stood before the judge in a physical courtroom. The hearing was done on com and the money never left her hand – it was just numbers that changed in an account she never looked at anyway.

“Maybe I should bring Sandra there. Remember how much trouble it was last time you traveled?”

“I want to see how this Sandra of yours keeps her house and what her taste is. I have to buy you a wedding present yet. It’s just across the lake to Toronto. Why don’t you bring a car? You’re always telling me you make plenty enough money. Surely you can afford to hire a car. Martha my neighbor I play cribbage with hires a car and driver every Christmas to go visit.”

“I’ll do that, Momma,” he relented, seeing no way out, and dreading a present that would need stored and hauled out for displayed if she came to visit again. “When Sandra gets back and we are both going to be at her place I’ll give you a call.” That satisfied her and he was able to wind it down and terminate. His usual post-Momma headache pounding, he got some analgesics out of his case and washed them down with mini-bar vodka. They hit like a ton of bricks when washed down with the booze. A car was a better idea, an extravagance he hardly ever bothered with for himself, but much cheaper than a fine for insulting strangers if she blurted out some inane observation again. Much cheaper if the judge saw the record and noted her previous conviction. He did maintain a license for air and ground. No need to take a chance she’d insult a driver.

The rest of the week went slow. The impending visit hanging over him like a sentencing hearing. He wrapped up his work sooner than he expected. He didn’t realize the cloud hanging over his head was so visible. One of his sources he expected to bribe had spilled his guts for free and seemed anxious to be clear of him. The man thought he was the object of the smoldering resentment on Ted’s face. The normal TeddieBeah looked like an angry Bruin this week. He got twice as much work done radiating anger like some sort of beacon. When he was able to retreat to the comfort of his own condo in Atlanta he signed himself off as unavailable for assignment. He did that so rarely that there was no objection.

A long run on the track and a comfort food breakfast at the community dinning hall of grits and real eggs helped soften his mood. He walked home to his workshop and put on some calming music. He’d displayed his workshop at the Pittsburgh convention in the spring. And taken the second prize losing out to a fellow who had a 2010 garage. The fellow had deserved the blue ribbon easily. There were no hard feeling over it. He wasn’t that competitive. The first prize diorama had not only a real 2006 Jeep but all the working tools and instrumentation to maintain it. The fellow even had some exotic tools like an arc welder that took special license and certification to own just as side items in his display. There were numerous extra details such as period containers of auto body products like polish and wax. As a fellow exhibiter he’d been invited behind the rope and even sat in the Jeep talking to the owner. The fellow had a video of him driving the manual control vehicle on a private ranch road out west. He’d joined half a dozen other auto owners there for a vacation and traded rides. They had all managed to pilot the behemoths around with no radar or computer controls and not bump into one another. That was amazing when you read how many thousands of wrecks had happened every single year back when auto controls were not mandatory. It made him wonder why they had been called automobiles back then when they really were not automatic at all.

His own display was a woodshop of the same period. He had class A through C power tool operator licenses for drill press, router and power saw. His Dewalt saw was an original antique with a cast iron table and a old 115 volt motor he had to run off a step down transformer. Because the man held the same certificates he’d allowed the Jeep exhibitor to cut a block of walnut with his help, and route his name on the face. The fellow had been really tickled. It took a full two days to ship everything back from Pittsburgh and set it back up at home again. Unwrapping each tool and hanging it on the peg board just so. He’d started a project of boxes before going to Singapore. He’d had the wood on order for over a year. Real Oak not simulated. They were glued up with mitered corners and he’d flock the inside when they were done. The lid was topped with a bought wood knob. That was his next acquisition – a lath for turning that sort of thing. A couple hours cutting and assembling and his frayed nerves were much better. He wished he had been born of an era one could do this sort of work for a living. He knew a CNC machine center and robotic handler could do in seconds what had taken him hours. But there was a satisfaction you couldn’t get by rendering it on a screen and having it returned completed to your hand with no effort.

Between the comfort of his own home, and soothing time at his hobby, by the time Sandra was back home he could join her and was able to calmly ask her to meet his mother. She didn’t seem put off despite his warnings that his mother was a caricature of herself, a twenty first century New York Jewish Mother in full plumage. He carefully warned her what subjects were sensitive and needed care or avoidance. In their home she rarely wore more than a sports bra and baggy shorts. Sometimes nothing at all. His warning to be modest was laughed at and she finally chased him away saying she had to get ready and he should calm down and go pick her up.

The guard at the retirement village checked his ID with more care than he’d received at classified government installations. He was directed away from the residence wings to the recreation and enrichment hall. He rolled over with the electric taxi motor in his nose wheel. It was too close to bother to lift and the elaborate landscaping looked like his fans would damage it.

As he parked he figured out the gardeners were not professionals but residents doing the flowers beds and sculpting the hedges as a hobby. He had to admit the results were impressive. Every bit as much a labor of love as his woodworking.

Walking through the doors was always strange. The furniture, the lighting fixtures, everything was dated like walking on a period movie set. Even most of the residents had on older fashions. He wondered who made them. Surely the originals were long worn out. It almost felt like the color should drain away from the scene and leave it sepia like an old faded photo.

His mother was sitting dressed for her outing and enthroned in a lounge chair like a queen for a day. She had on a suit with a straight skirt and a handbag that belonged in the Smithsonian. Her shoes were utterly impractical. He was glad they weren’t marching around an air terminal. Not to mention such shoes were considered kinky sex toys now. A fact that would horrify her. She even had a funny little hat pinned on her hair. Thankfully she was not quite old enough to consider a pair of gloves necessary for a public outing. Ted wasn’t sure by how many decades she had missed that custom. He could remember seeing them in flat movies that were not too far behind her era. A hard sided suitcase at her feet announced that she considered Toronto an overnight trip. He wasn’t about to correct that with the circle of cronies in pants suits and blue jeans inspecting him to see if he was worthy to remove their queen.

“Momma, you look lovely. Ladies,” he acknowledged, and bowed gallantly to the hostile audience. He snatched up the suitcase before she could force him to engage in chit-chat with her minions. “We’d best go,” he suggested adding a little white lie. “There’s rain coming soon and I’d rather have clear skies to cross the lake.”

“Oh you’re taking an air car,” one of her purple pant suited retainers said with obvious distain. “I always get queasy in those things.”

“It’s a five hour drive to go around through Buffalo,” he explained. “On auto it’s rarely more than twenty minutes straight across.”

“Don’t worry,” his mother patted her companions knee. “Teddy’s father always flew us about back when it was all manual. He was a as heavy handed and clumsy as a flier as he was with everything else,” she said , winking. “and I survived that too.” They all exchanged smirks and seemed to share a private joke in which Ted was left out. He was happy his mother stood up and they could flee the circle of harpies.

They taxied out of the security gate, Ted being more certain now that blowing the flowers  lodged flat wouldn’t go over very well. He turned into the slow lane, turned it on automatic and control granted them an immediate rolling lift. It was a glorious pretty day and the windows darkened on the sunny side as they lifted into sunlight. Downtown Cleveland was a bit to the west on their left and they could see the Canadian side before they had cleared the near shore. There must be a lot of traffic today for them to be slotted so high. This was Sandra’s flyer. His was in Atlanta. He only used his locally and always went commercial between their homes. He thought his mother would comment on it, the mauve interior with plush fabrics obviously not his taste. But she seemed oblivious. The noise increased subtly as the car switched from lift to forward acceleration. In just a couple minutes the pattern of waves in the water below was falling visibly astern. There was a slight vibration to the slipstream that said they were pushing the Mach, then the nose dipped almost imperceptivity and the noise faded back so conversation was easier.

“Sandra’s condo is in a rather large community just like mine,” he tried chatting up his mother. “They average about three thousand occupied units. Quite a few families. Some people like it so well they stay and just buy out a different floor plan when their needs change. That way they keep the same kitchen and services package. My place in Atlanta has private garages, but hers has a community parking deck. That’s not much of a burden because her car here,” he patted the dash, “is smart enough to go park itself.”

“Does she know any of her neighbors then?” her mother seemed actually interested.

“Oh yes, She had a little party back before we were married and there were two neighbors there. One an artist lady who works in physical media, and an older gentleman who is retired now, but used to work in banking. I gather quite a few meet each other for tennis and chat in the exercise rooms and pool.

“Is that it?” Momma asked. A sprawled clump of buildings loomed close in front of them. They were on a long shallow dive aimed well below the horizon straight at the complex.

“Sure is. We should be down in five minutes.” He let the car stay on auto but laid his hands loosely on the yoke – just in case. A stab with his right thumb would override and put them on manual. Then he’d better have a very good reason to explain why he did so to control.

Sandy’s car was a luxury model and wasted a few grams of fuel making a gentle transition to hover and touched down so lightly they couldn’t feel it. They knew they were landed when the turbines spooled down to silence. As they walked away the car taxied away to park itself silently.

The landscaping was not nearly as impressive as his mother’s building. Security however was just as tight. Momma seemed a bit put off, but didn’t complain when she had to press her hand flat on a glass panel for the guard. She did wipe it first with a frilly hankie. The guard watched from a holo screen, unsurprised. The people in this complex went in an out a great deal more than a retirement community, and he had to cover several entries. There would have been much more of a delay if Ted hadn’t cleared all his momma’s information ahead of time with security.

Ted hoped the inside would impress her. Her retirement home was old fashioned. It had hallways like a hotel. The sort of building the current generation would dismiss as a rat warren. Here the residences opened on a common courtyard in groups of eight. It was a domed area like a little park, with a short passage at two corners to other courtyards. Even that was wide not a hallway, with benches and art to break it up. They only had to walk to the far side of the first courtyard to reach Sandy’s door.

“Hello, we’re home,” he called for his mom’s benefit when they stepped in. He’d dropped a message on Sandy’s implant when they landed, but he knew from experience his mother would find it spooky if they communicated silently. Something smelled good, stronger than he was used to. He was nonplussed when Sandra came out of her hobby room wearing a costume she used for exhibitions, but she took over hugging his mother and chatting away so she never noticed his confusion.

“That’s your show getup.” Ted IM’d her so she’d read it off her heads-up privately.

“Ted take your mother’s things down to the blue bedroom,” she instructed ignoring his message. “I have just a couple things to wrap up in here and we can have a bite. Would you like to step in my kitchen for a moment Mother Weis?”

“Oh, Just call me Sara,” his mom said in a buttery voice he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Don’t be juggling my elbow,” Sandra instructed him by implant as he walked the suitcase down to his mother’s room. “I can’t trade IM’s or audio and not show it to where she will figure out we’re talking around her. I’ll give you audio but just listen,” she warned him.

“My goodness, I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a young woman in a shirtwaist dress,” his mother gushed.

“Do you like it? There is a lady in the building who can make clothing from your measurements for almost any period. Here, sit at the table and I’ll finish up and take this in the dining room.”

“Why don’t you just serve us here dear? I’m sure there is plenty of room and it seems so much more intimate.”

“If you’d like. Here, I have a pad and table cloth for this table. I’m ever so careful of the enameled top.”

Ted came back to find the Sears table which he knew to be insured for seven hundred thousand dollars actually set for dinner with antique Corelle and almost priceless real glass tumblers. The smell he’d noticed coming in was now identified by a loaf of bread cooling on the sideboard. He wondered briefly if Sandy faked that, putting an unsliced loaf in a warm oven, but the bread fit too tightly in the antique loaf pan. She’d actually baked bread in her oven.

They were going to sit and eat with her best collection pieces. He was scared to death. One mistake could ruin a piece that might be insured, but that didn’t mean a replacement piece could be found. It might take years for one to come up at an auction.

“Sit down Ted. You look like you need a drink. Would you like a little wine?”

Ted pictured himself holding a glass of red wine over her antique Irish Linen tablecloth. It would be like holding a grenade with the pin pulled. “No, please, just a glass of water would be fine.” He sat on one of the chairs carefully. He’d never sat on one before. His mother and Sandy babbled on about roast beef and new potatoes and he eased the chair up to the table careful not to stress it. They hardly knew he was there.

The beef was tender as could be. That was fortunate, because he was afraid to really cut hard with his knife. He knew it was silly but he could see the precious plate splitting in two under his cut. Everything he did was awkward – calculated – and when Sandra insisted she would serve dessert in the TV room he was relieved even though he had never heard they had a TV room. He’d gladly follow anywhere they wanted to go to get away from the terror of damaging something.

The TV room turned out to be Sandra’s office. It did have the biggest wall screen in the house. To his relief they didn’t screen anything though. Sandy had the screen on an environmental channel with great herds of African beasts on a dusty plain. He knew his mother was disgusted with most modern  entertainment, but she was content talking away with Sandy. She seemed genuinely interested in her work. Sandy was relating a case she had tried on Luna and if the legal details were beyond his mother she approved that way Sandy had made sure the scum who had committed fraud was brought to sure justice. Finally his mother started yawning, and Sandy insisted on showing her to her room.

“I’ve had such a good time,” his mother said getting up. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a good visit with Teddy.” Ted just smiled. He hadn’t said a thing for hours.

“You just speak my name out loud if you need anything,” Sandy told her giving her a hug. The house AI will call me if you need me. I have to be up and away early, but I’ll have the community kitchen lay out a nice breakfast for Ted and you in the morning.”

“Oh, that too bad. But I’m glad we had this evening.” If he’d done that to her his mom would have given him hell for ducking out on her. He was amazed. Sandy had her wrapped around her finger. He just sat still, scared he’d do something to spoil it as they walked down the hall. Momma didn’t even say good night, busy chatting away with Sandy.

* * *

            “You are amazing,” Ted told her when she returned to their room. “I’ve never seen anyone tame the savage beast like you. I’m so relieved that is over and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“Oh she’s nothing. She’s a sweetheart. I’ve had experience with much worse.”

“I’ve met your mother,” Ted objected. “Both your parents are very modern people. I can’t imagine them giving you are hard time like my mother, or being an embarrassment in public.”

“No, not my mother, my nonna, my granny.”

“You’ve never mentioned her. What’s she like?”

“She was born in 1930. It was the Great Depression worldwide. There was no work and no money so her family had to go back to the Italian mountain village where they had roots to survive on the family farm.”

“That’s even before my mother’s generation.”

Sandy nodded agreement. “Then when she was almost thirteen the Fascists took all the men away from their village as unreliable.”

“Fascists?”

“World War II – what they call the First Atomic War now. So she got involved with the resistance, the partisans. She’d quite proud she learned to handle a rifle as well as a man and shot or blew up a few Nazis herself.”

“That’s – remarkable.” Ted had never held a real firearm.

“So after the war the family came to America. She did too many jobs to even start to tell and ended up in a nursing home in 2027 when she was ninety-seven years old. She was frail but sharp mentally. Of course I wasn’t born yet. My parents hadn’t had their first rejuv even. I have pictures of her in the nursing home. She was the stereotypical Old World grandma in all black with the button up kidskin shoes and a head scarf. In 2032 she had her first rejuv. It took really well, and her next one was even better. To look at her today she looks about like a natural sixty. A very robust sixty. And she dropped the period clothing so you’d never notice her in a crowd. She’s likely one of the oldest people alive today, coming up on her fifth century.”

“So she’s a handful? Does she live in a period retirement home like my mother with people her age?”

“Not at all. She lives in a regular community on Sicily and she climbs on the shuttle any time it strikes her fancy and goes to visit my folks in Armstrong. As far as a handful…If I tried to handle her she’d give me her beady eyed look and tell me not to teach granny how to cut hay.”

“So, Italy, she…I mean your family must be Catholic right? Have you told her you married a Jew? Is that a problem?”

“Not at all. When I screened her she said any people the Nazis and Fascists hated so bad couldn’t be all bad.”

“Does she uh…get in trouble out in public like my mother?”

“No, if she makes a point you can bet she can defend it or it can be taken two ways. She has implants and has declared herself extraterritorial. She cave dives for fun and keeps a shuttle certificate current for orbit to orbit and airless landings. She said if you have a backbone and can drink like a man, we’ll have her blessing.”

“Backbone? Oh…” he hadn’t heard that usage in awhile. “Well I better lay in a supply of Sober-Ez  if we ever visit her.”

“That might be a good idea Dear,” Sandy said giving him a peck, and calling the lights out. “She’s coming to meet you this weekend.”

“Dear God,” he whispered to the dark.

END

All rights reserved

Ball and Chain – A stand alone short

 

Ball and Chain

Mackey Chandler

            “It’s this damn Slump,” Tim Kirkland grumped. “There’s no market for even Earth mined materials, how can Luna possibly develop an economy without exports? If it wasn’t for defense they’d have probably pulled back and mothballed the Moon bases already. For sure they would have if they weren’t scared the other fellows would snatch the whole Moon. When things get back to normal and scarcity kicks in again things will open up. I’ve had my application in for Luna now for seven years. I’m way ahead of most folks in the Queue.”

“Are you applied with the Americans, Indians or the Chinese?” Aaron asked skeptically.

“The Americans and Indians both actually. The Chinese wouldn’t take my reservation without a full deposit and an assurance I wasn’t signed on with anyone else, snotty little buggers.”

“I’m tired of hearing The Slump, The Slump, as an excuse for everything,” Aaron growled. They should tell the truth and call it the Greater Depression. You’re thirty-two years old man. How long has it been The Slump for you?”

“Call it twenty, twenty-six years. Depends on if you count from 2008 or 2012. I remember as a kid we had it pretty good. I was an only, but still, we used to go out to eat a couple times a week. My mom and my dad both kept a car. My God those were cars too, big lumbering steel beasts built like a battle tank.”

“Let’s be honest. Is there any guarantee it won’t still be The Slump twenty years forward from now? Other than the same promises just before every election?”

“Prosperity is just ahead. It’s as certain as global warming,” he said sarcastically. The continued cold weather was as responsible for the prolonged slump in the economy as any political stupidity. Nobody had ever disavowed the carbon treaties and such, they simply stopped talking about it. Maybe they hoped people would forget, but they hadn’t.

“You could save enough to go by the time you are forty likely. If you don’t marry and if you don’t get caught with your ‘investments’.”

Tim made a squelching motion with his hand and grimaced. It was a family burger place, and noisy, but he hadn’t pulled the battery on his phone, and you just never knew when you might be monitored at random. He pulled it now, and pulled the foil faced paper from under his fries and wrapped the phone in that too.”

“My, you are getting paranoid,” Aaron marveled. “Don’t you have your minders on the take so you don’t have to worry about such things?”

“You can buy off your security folks but it gets expensive. I’d rather make the effort and keep my profits maximized. Anyway, you know I don’t just want to take a two week lift as a tourist. I want to live up there, maybe even beyond the Moon if that happens in my lifetime.”

“If you’re that much of a risk taker I’m encouraged. I wanted to run a solution past you, but wasn’t sure you’d have the guts to consider it.”

“If that’s your idea of drawing me into a warm feeling of camaraderie you need to work on your presentation. If I’m such a cowardly lout you can find someone else better I’m sure.”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know anyone as eager to go to the Moon, except my nephew Eddy and he’s just turned twelve, so that’s a bit of a wait too. What if I had a way to open up travel not just for you, but for everyone? We can’t change the economy, but there are other factors in the equation to alter. Changes that would do a world of good for quite a few people. I have a little development I’ve been working on. I have a patent application in on it right now actually. It can change the expense factor of lifting to the Moon, and everywhere else above Clarke orbit too.”

“Lift vehicles are a very mature Technology,” Tim objected. “Nobody is willing to build  nuclear rockets for political reasons. I suspect they have a few actually, but if they do it’s damn black and likely to stay that way. I know you do fiber design and nano fabrication for the University. I’m pretty sure you’re the smartest guy I know, Aaron. But I don’t see even you designing an anti-gravity machine in that home workshop of yours.”

“Not at all. But you are aware they have had materials now for about five years, which could be used to make a Beanstalk?”

“As in “Fountains of Paradise”? A humongous ball and chain on the Earth? I read it would take about fifty-Trillion dollars to put a real one up, and that was US dollars, not Canadian. I can just imagine every jihadist in the world salivating at the idea of getting a tactical nuke on an elevator car if they did build the thing. I don’t like to characterize us as the poor cousins, but if it gets built it will be the Americans. Canada doesn’t have that kind of wealth free to use, and it will take a huge application of military and political power to run the thing. You have to buy off some nation on the equator, and then pour enough troops and equipment around the base of the thing so nobody thanks you for building it and then nationalizes it. I can’t think of anywhere around the Earth’s waist I’d want to trust.”

“Yes, but, it was a Russian, Tsiolkovsky, who developed the concept, long before it was popular in fiction. But a ball and chain is restrictive, this is more like a lifeline thrown in stormy seas. I’d like you to give me your word that you will hold this closely confidential, and I’d like to invite you over tomorrow evening to demo a few things for you.”

“Well,” Tim huffed, raising his eyebrows. “I’m not used to such gravity and formality, but you have my word as a gentleman, if such a thing can truly exist today.”

“It does if you wish it,” Aaron assured him. “I’ll pick up the tab today too,” he offered and swiped his paycard for both meals.

* * *

            “I’m here to see the stuff,” Tim growled in his best gangster style when Aaron opened the door.

“What, no body guards? No evil henchmen waiting in the car?” The absurdity of a wiseguy named Timmy made him smile, but he’d never tell his friend that.

“I prefer minions. They’re much more cost effective and low key.”

Tim hung his jacket and stood on his boot heels in turn to step out of his boots. He’d been here before. It wasn’t a house rule, but if he left his boots on Aaron’s eyes kept going back to them, worrying about his crème carpets.

“I hope you can wrap this up in time for the game.”

“Who’s playing, uh, you mean hockey I assume?”

“No, Bocce Ball,” he said and rolled his eyes.

“I don’t think I have any beer, you’ll get cross with me.”

“I have twelve cooling in the car. They won’t freeze for another hour.”

“Let’s get downstairs then. They lose all their fizz if you pop them slushy.”

 * * *

            “This is a pair of die maker’s stereo magnifiers,” Aaron offered, putting his on to show Tim how. “You turn the knob on the left to adjust the magnification. The right knob adjust the little headlight at the temple pieces. The over shade is to protect from laser so don’t be tipping it up.”

He picked up small bit of metal with a frosty stone set in it. “This is a diamond anvil with a nice tapered hole drilled through it. I have a piece of Bucky wrap that is strong enough to build a space elevator looped through the diamond. And the anvil slips into this handle,” he said sliding a hand grip back until the anvil snugged in hollow on his side, “so you can pull on it without slicing your fingers off like a cheese cutter.” A tube surrounded the line on the other side.

“That’s so thin, do you loop that through and tie a knot by hand? I’d never feel it.”

“You’d feel it when it cut your fingers. The line is braided of nine smaller fibers. You clamp it two places, push them towards each other to spread them open, and interweave the end back into itself. Now, this is as far as the line reaches from the wall over there.” He pulled on the handle and it didn’t come past the edge of the bench he was using. Tim squinted along the line in the direction of an anchor set in the concrete wall. He could see a few centimeters of it finer than a hair, and then it was lost to sight off toward the wall.

“I’m going to have you snap this, but I want to anneal a place near the anvil. If it snaps at the other end the whole thing can whip back and cut you. When it breaks near the handle it will fly toward the wall.” He pulled a pocket laser and laid the tiny line across a graphite block. He pushed the switch repeatedly and  a red spot glowed hot each time. “There, pull on it a bit, see how strong it is.”

Tim picked up the hand piece  and pulled it. It came to a definite stop, but was free to move side to side. The line to the wall was long enough you couldn’t feel the arc. Tim leaned until his weight was hanging on it.

“Amazing stuff.” Tim said. “There is no give to it at all.”

“Now go ahead and give it a good jerk. I can break it so I know you can.”

Tim took a stance, so he wouldn’t overbalance and turned his hand around with the protective tube sticking up through the middle of his fingers. He gave one pretty good jerk, but it didn’t snap. He backed his swing up a bit further and snapped it clean with one hard pull. He followed through but didn’t lose control.

“Tough stuff,” was all he acknowledged.

“Indeed. Now this is the new thing I brought you to see,” he said picking up a similar but bulkier hand piece. “It is a bit thinner so crank up the magnification because I want you to see it better”

Tim leaned in and adjusted the viewer.

“See the wedge pushed in the hole with this one? That’s an electrical contact. Now observe the surface color of the thread.” He flipped a switch that stuck out of the grip. “Did you see that?”

“It went from dull black to kind of shiny I think.”

“Yes. That’s exactly right. Now I want you to do the same thing as before, except…”

Tin snapped the line taunt with everything he had.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

The handle ripped out of his hand and he doubled over his abused wrist holding it against his waist with his other hand.

“Holy shit. Nothing should be that strong,” Tim objected hopping up and down a little.

“Did you break it?” Aaron asked concerned.

“I didn’t hear a crack, but I think I better put some ice around it and watch it a bit. You can damn well go out and bring the beer in. You could have talked a little faster Dude.”

They stayed upstairs and watched Toronto starting against Detroit. The wrist didn’t turn funny colors or swell quickly so they concluded he didn’t break anything.

“I’m thinking about it,” Tim said. “I still see problems.”

“I know a few. I have something else to show you after the game.”

“To hell with the game,” Tim said getting up. “Toronto zero, Detroit two. They have the better goalie and that’s how it will wrap up. If it doesn’t I’m down six-thousand dollars in the morning. Try not to hurt me with this next demo.”

“I know you are concerned about a site for a Beanstalk. I have a model prepared to show you a concept. Here we have our globe.” It was a globe too, taken off the usual mount and put on an electric motor shaft.

“This is our base location,” he pointed out a screw firmly driven into Ecuador on the globe.

“Here is our counter weight,” he produce a golf ball with an eyelet screwed into it and a straw colored thread dangling. “The tread is just Kevlar, but it is our cable.” He looped the thread around the screw and tied it. The tread reached all the way around the globe and just enough to hang it back over the screw.

“Stand back, I cracked myself on the knee with this first time I spun it.”

“You’re dangerous man.”

Aaron retreated to a switch and turned it on. The globe spun and flung the ball out. It whipped around the globe in a blur until he killed the switch again and it dropped and bounced to a stop.

“Yep, that’s just what I pictured,” Tim agreed.

“But that isn’t the only way to do it,” Aaron told him pulling a screwdriver out of his pocket. He took the screw out of Ecuador and started turning it into a hole he hadn’t noticed. It was Toronto.

“But, you can’t do that,” Tim objected.

“Would you rather Vancouver?” Aaron asked pleasantly. “It has a better climate I admit. And you don’t have to bring shipping for the elevator up the Saint Lawrence. But there are financial reasons and political considerations. I certainly don’t want it in Quebec, and it’s about a tossup for shipping grain off the plains. I suspect a great deal of rye and oats will be riding up the thing.”

“That’s not what I mean. You can’t just screw the bloody thing on anywhere. That’s cheating.”

“Why?” Aaron asked him. “Oh it might get a bit difficult above above sixty degrees north. But at Toronto you have significant angular velocity.”

“Well, you know, it’s out of balance. It has to hang off the center straight.”

“Ah,” Aaron sighed agreeably, You’re going to hang another on the other side so we don’t unbalance the earth and make it wobbly all over the place. I expect some die hard environmentalist  to bring that up actually. I didn’t think you so Green.”

“Well not wobble,” Tim insisted indignantly. “I know the elevator won’t mass that much compared to the Earth, But it won’t pull straight. This is just a shell. The real Earth pulls with gravity, so the line of force pulling on the counterweight down,” he demonstrated with his hands, “won’t be in line with the tension on the line,” he asserted, very happy with himself.

“And the counter weight would not be exactly at the Clarke orbit. In fact it would be just a hair more difficult to match a spaceship with it and dock than on a perfect equatorial orbit,” he went on and finished repositioning the screw. “But then too, a lot of other users in Earth orbit might be just as happy  not to have this huge battering ram of a counter weight whizzing about the planet right in the plane where they want to naturally orbit free floating objects.” he pointed out.

“But tell me. If there was no gravity involved where would the counterweight float when you spun up the system?”

“Right in the lane of rotation. At right angles to a line through the poles.”

“Okay, ” Aaron agreed, retreating and flipping the motor on again,”pretty much like this right?”

The ball zoomed around in a plane that passed through Toronto.”Now gravity is pulling the golf ball down too. It must be dipped down toward the floor a half degree or so. It just swings over on the thread a bit and finds an equilibrium position right?”

“Too small to see, but yeah, must be,” he agreed.

“Now if we were talking about using material that was strained almost to the yield point, I’d worry about having it in a slight arc with side forces on it. The primary problem has always been the weight of the cable hanging on itself, not the tension or forces of cars climbing up and down. My new material is so much stronger there’s no need to worry about that. We’ll have a good engineering margin like proper designers know is necessary. None of this building the world’s biggest high speed centrifuge with no protective cage.”

“Crap, I feel stupid.”

“Not at all. We just changed a part of the equation everyone assumed was a constant.”

“Let’s go back upstairs. I need another beer.”

* * *

            “Can you tell me in short sensible terms why it’s so strong?

“It’s a form of Bucky too. You have a long bucky-tube and create regular defects on the side walls. There is a high temperature superconductor inside and it cross links through these defects and locks the fibers together. It’s similar to how wool felts up when you pack it, but on a molecular scale. You work harden them by moving them around and more of these side opening line up and bound. So it grows stronger as you load it and unload it. It has about the same strength as regular bucky tube material. But if you hook a battery up it will actively resist being elongated. It actually pulls back against the force applied. Pull more, it draws more current. You reach a threshold where it can’t draw any more current and it fails spectacularly. Obviously using it to build you need a very reliable power source to trust something with actively powered mechanical properties. You start off with a big roll of bucky with the material inside and keep rolling it down thinner and thinner. At the end you have to draw it through diamond dies in an intense magnetic field.

* * *

            “Would you like to help me build it?” Aaron asked. “I mean, you’re going there anyway, right?”

“I’d love to see you build it, but you need some real high-powered business help to bring something like that to market. You need investment bankers, and lawyers and people I don’t know.”

“You want to go yourself. This will open the road faster than anything on the horizon. You can go while you are still a fairly young man. It will be all the other applications that pay for the Beanstalk. That will be your work for a long time. Somebody else I wouldn’t be sure they wouldn’t get bogged down with all the other applications and never get around to building the Stalk. I’ll have other people for various things, but I want you for my business guy. This is going to change everything about bridges, and body armor, and rotating devices, pressure vessels, high pressure chemistry, synthetic diamonds and other materials. All that has to be started and the use of it known and standard before the cable goes up. I’m willing to let you have the majority ownership of the Beanstalk as a separation bonus when we are done. By that time you won’t want to work for me anymore, and I will have so much income from the other uses it’s silly to think I can want for anything.”

“Aaron, you are talking Billions of dollars to own an orbital elevator. I don’t have the kind of capital to start to do a mailing to promote this thing.”

“So we start with lesser applications. You are good with business, I’m not. At least there isn’t any cloud hanging over my rights. I was smart enough to document all my work on this. Every time I logged on the computer and the time line of every physical experiment I did. There is not a dollar of Government money or an hour of University time involved. I own the intellectual property clear. I’ve even kept a more detailed log of my work for the University so if they say – “Well, you must have worked on it sometime.” I can say – Here, show me where it fit in. Was it while I lectured all day on April 8, 2019? Just lets have one thing clear,” Aaron said and looked at him hard. “You try to screw me out of the whole thing, and I’ll cut the living heart out of your chest and let you die looking at the bloody thing.” He was holding his hand out cupped between them and looking Tim right in the eye.

Tim looked at his palm like he could see it beating there. “Partner, those are the kind of contract terms a guy doesn’t forget. I’m still in.”

* * *

            “I thought twelve years was wildly optimistic,” Aaron said. “Ten years was fantastic. You did a fine job, Tim.”

“I thought twenty years was downright depressing,” Tim countered. “I didn’t want to ride a gurney up the damn thing.”

They both stood and watched the dots of elevator cars accelerating away up the shiny black column. So huge it seemed unreal, and the fact it tilted off the vertical over toward the South still looked strange to Tim.

“I thought we’d have more resistance, especially from the Americans, but everything fell into place, especially the last couple years.”

Tim just looked at him with that superb poker face.

“What? You know I can’t read you when you are like that. But it tells me you have something going on in there you don’t want to reveal.”

“The government got a lot more cooperative two years ago. Remember when General McPherson was retired?”

“Yeah?”

“They called me in the morning you flew to Hong Kong. You remember that trip?”

“Sure, we were having trouble getting cobalt. The guy who controlled it was there.”

“McPherson had a bunch of Air Force goons, come by and give me one of those invitations you can’t turn down to go talk with him.”

Aaron thought a minute and nodded. “Now I remember, I got the appointment and if I took the fast plane I could be there for breakfast and head right back. You weren’t in your office and neither was Madeline, so I called a car and hustled to the airport. I knew you had stuff to do anyway, so you wouldn’t have come along.”

“You remember when you called me next?”

Aaron made a show of thinking. “It’s been two years. From the hotel?” he asked.

“Nope, you called from the plane. General McPherson had just explained to me that the government couldn’t let one man in private control of their access to space as a matter of national security. He was letting me know I was expected to help them in the transition to nationalization.”

“Son of a bitch.” Aaron said.

“So right at that point you call, doing paper work and talking to me on the side all distracted. I know exactly what you sound like when you are doing that.  McPherson wanted to know what was happening. I informed him that as soon as he pulled me in you, by some strange coincidence, were on a private supersonic headed for Hong Kong within ten minutes. I told him that was the first time in eight years you’d walked out like that without telling me. His communication tech looks at him and says, “Voice analysis says a bit more than 97% probability of truthfulness.”

“There’s no way he could have known we set this up,” he objected. “That’s when the other two guys with us wearing stars started getting all twitchy.

“You can listen in I assume,” I told them and went back to your call. “You never noticed.”

“Well sure. You were always covering the mic and yelling at somebody. I never twitched at a little dead air time. I guess that would sound strange to somebody who doesn’t know us.”

“So I asked when you would be back, and as usual you were noncommittal, so I took a chance,” I said, “Aaron tell me straight. Are you coming back?”

“You always say weird stuff like – Are you going to stay in Fuji with the native girls? Some of us have work to do Aaron. Don’t you think it’s time to buy Peru? I distinctly remember one time I had you on speaker phone and you told the whole executive board of Mitsubishi you didn’t think I loved you anymore. They all think to this day that we’re secret Joy Boys. That’s how I know your calls are over. You never say hello or goodbye like normal people.”

“Do you remember how you signed off?

“Nah, it’s been too long. I always try to be as big a smart ass as you, but it’s hard. You’re pretty damn quick.”

“Give me a reason,” you said. It had just been a particularly nasty week here with snow and ice. That could explain why you said, “I might find the climate more pleasing in China,” you said that and hung up.

“That sounds…”

“Yep, couldn’t have said anything better if we’d had a play book and worked it out ahead of time. They thought for sure you were defecting. The jackass looked at his creep with the military grade lie machine. Kid just shakes his head he isn’t reading any deceit at all.”

“The General says, “You expect me to believe this private citizen penetrates our security better than we hack his, and is willing to fly away from all this wealth he has created these last eight years and will start over again in China?”

“So I told him a little bit of the truth.”

“I don’t expect you to believe anything. But one of my main jobs is spreading his money all over the planet as fast as it comes in, so some self-important fascist, who couldn’t start to create what he has created, can’t just walk in and steal it without even a gun in his hand. That ‘private citizen’ just sold licenses this quarter greater than the GNP of France,” I told him.

“What can we do? One of the other Generals asked.

“I have no idea,” I told him. “I have no idea who he uses or how he gets intelligence. Are you familiar with when his University sued him and tried to take his patents?” I asked them. “His lawyers came into court with twenty-six spiral bound notebooks. They were provably his holographic documents by the handwriting and their age was testable. They were too extensive to have been generated as a fraud in the available time. They detailed any period of ten minutes in his life for the last six years to prove he made his invention on his own time. They documented every drive, every meal, every phone call and movie he saw. He even documented when he took a crap. What kind of a man foresees he’s going to need something like that? Every point you could check like stopping to buy fuel for his car or if he bought a coffee with his paycard was accurate. I do know for damn sure I’m not going to cross him.”

“Thank you, Tim.”

“Don’t thank me. I related to them the little speech you gave me about ripping my living heart out and letting me die staring at the bloody thing if I tried to screw you.” The asshole actually had the nerve to look at his techie and confirm I wasn’t making it up.”

“Oh, my.”

“All I could suggest to them was that they dismantle whatever idiotic scheme they had devised and if you thought they could be trusted to mean it you’d find out and  you’d come back. I wasn’t about advise you what to do when you obviously had better sources of advice than me. I was going to go back to work and hope the whole sorry mess blew over. And I did.”

“Wow, the whole thing was a gigantic bluff,” Aaron said smiling. But his eyes weren’t laughing anymore than they had been for the heart speech.

“Was it? You always have kept everyone separated doing their own job. I barely knew we have a Security department for example. Except they are there instantly if you need them. I thought maybe it was bluff, but Hiroshi saw me last year and started reminiscing about when you flew out to talk to him. Funny how people remember and replay a visit with an important person when mundane things are forgotten. A fellow might be in the army and sixty years later what he remembers is the day the President  visited his outfit and shook hands with him. Hiroshi said how impressed he was with your decisiveness. He remembered how you dashed to the plane in order to get there for a breakfast meeting and then called him when in the air to make the appointment, not the other way around. ‘How can you turn down a person with that force of will?’ he asked.”

“Well it’s been two years, those things get kind of hazy,” Aaron allowed and looked at Tim with honest affection. “You know, I told you I wanted you for my business guy. It wasn’t really your concern who took care of other matters, or how. I’d say everyone did a splendid job. It’s time for me to hand over the rest of my stock in the Beanstalk like I promised. You’ve had your fill of running back down here for little problems these last couple months. I expect I’ll come up for a weekend and see how you are doing. You can show me the sights, take me to Apollo Park.”

“I’d love that, but don’t dawdle. Things are so much cheaper now, and building up so fast, I expect to be able to buy commercial passage to Mars pretty soon. I think I’d like to see it before it is all crowded.”

Aaron nodded agreement but had that distracted look he always got when he was really thinking. “I expect you already know, it would be much easier to build an elevator on Mars than Earth. I mean, as long as you are going there anyway,” he pointed out.

END

Rights reserved

Godzilla sort of scene – snippet

This is from late in April past where I will snippet chapters. It deals with Home making war on North America. I hope I get the epic disaster flavor right-

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Martin Crain was seven hours into his work day. Tired and sucking down some coffee to carry him to the end. A little more than another hour and he’d drop his road train of three trailers at a routing yard in St Louis, and get a room. He was almost to the Mississippi bridge when a East St. Louis cop car and an Illinois State Trooper both passed him going flat out. They didn’t have their lights on but traffic was light and the two left lanes mostly open.

His dashboard display worked for GPS, but the satellite based traffic warning system had been down for a couple weeks. His eyes flicked up to it anyway out of habit. The traffic coming the other way was about the same as his side so that was a good sign. He thought he’d get past whatever the cops were responding to until he got another mile and saw the backup. There were about two dozen road trains and big rigs stopped in the two right lanes. A handful of private cars could be seen in the third lane about two hundred meters ahead right at the edge of the bridge. He flipped on his flashers and braked to a stop in the second lane.

Martin shut his engine off quickly to conserve fuel. He waited until two more trucks were stopped behind him so he knew nobody would be plowing into his stopped rig and locked his cab and walked forward to see what was wrong.

The Illinois State trooper was parked across the left lanes, and the city cop across the right. There was some kind of pounding coming from the river, like a jack hammer but slower. When he got all the way to the front the cops had reflective tape draped from the center divider to their cars in turn and to the last reflector on the shoulder before the bridge abutment itself.

The drivers were four deep around the city cop and he couldn’t even get close so he asked a fellow driver hanging back if he knew what was going on.

“Somebody is tearing up the cable support delta tower on this side of the river. I’m from the second rig there in the right lane. When I stopped you could see the concrete dust drifting out from under the bridge deck.”

Martin looked around. There were no aircraft in sight, and no sounds like a gun firing. It didn’t make any sense.

“If it’s serious why aren’t they blocking off the bridge from the Missouri side?”

“Damned if I know,” the other driver told him. “The cops said they called them over there. I guess that’s why they call it the ‘Show Me’ state.”

Just then the constant crack, crack, crack was drowned out by a long shriek of tortured steel tearing. The near tower fell, thankfully away from them, falling straight along the highway. The cables sang like giant guitar strings, then tore out of the nearby foundations and whipped high in the air following the tower. The deck of the bridge was smashed down into the water out well past the center of the river. The rigs like Martin’s still filling the eastbound lanes crushed like toys. Water from the river fell all around them like a sudden heavy rain. The delta tower on the opposite bank was pulled toward them briefly in seeming slow motion, and then rebounded and fell on the Missouri approaches the same direction the near tower had fallen.

When all the noise finally died down Martin looked at the other driver standing mouth still hanging open and staring in horror.

“Well I guess that showed them,” he agreed.

“April” Chapter 3 The Main Character

Our heroine finally shows up:

Chapter 3

            Monday morning, nine o’clock was three hours into main-shift on Mitsubishi 3. April Lewis was listening to the Earth news for October 4, 2083 while she walked to the cafeteria to meet her friend Heather. M3 ran on North American Pacific Time, the unofficial standard time of near Earth space, and Disney News was on the same time zone being California based.

April was station born and more interested in what was happening locally, but followed the Earth news to please her parents who were Earthborn. They’d lived in California before coming to M3, and seemed to appreciate it if she knew what was going on below, even though it often didn’t make any sense to her. Disney was more likely to have California or space stories than most foreign news channels, so she picked it even though you had to factor in that their news was run through USNA censors. April didn’t know a news service that wasn’t run through somebody’s filter.

There were two thousand residents in M3, surpassed in orbit only by New Las Vegas when they had a full tourist load. The habitat produced a lot of valuable goods that couldn’t be made groundside, and was home to quite a bit of research and development, yet the news channels rarely mentioned M3 unless a celebrity was visiting. When they did mention Spacers lately they seemed to be unfairly critical and April was tired of hearing it. Station dwellers were portrayed by the media as overpaid opportunists and dangerously lacking in social conformity. Newsies even complained they ate too well. The high cost of living, and salaries to match, made the residents easy targets of resentment as surely as someone living in Palm Springs or the Principality of Monaco.

* * *

            In World News the Japanese cut off imports of Canadian bio-Diesel claiming active turkey prions were present in the exhaust.

The European Union was threatening Switzerland with sanctions for holding gold and platinum for EU citizens in safe deposit after private ownership of the metals was outlawed again last year.

In National News the honorable Senator Smith from Puerto Rico had demanded the honorable Senator Macmillan from The Yukon allow his Federal Identity data be checked against the genome of her fraternal  twins ‑ and he had matched ‑ for one of them. The comedians and cartoonists were having a field day speculating on how far afield a search for the other twin’s father should proceed.

The mayor of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio was assassinated by a proximity bomb outside his garage door, and a group calling themselves Buckeyes for Property Rights claimed responsibility.

The fall colors in Vermont were forecast to be the best in years later this month due to unseasonably early cool weather. The program ended with a required public service spot urging vigilant citizens to call their Neighborhood Defender and report unusual activity to combat the blight of black markets and unregistered businesses.

* * *

            April was dressed casually like most people in the corridors. She wore gray sweats with loose pants and a zippered, hooded top. Her snug moon boots were a popular fashion now, but with regular soles not the expensive slick and stick nanotech soles like the real thing. It was just old-fashioned unpowered clothing without heating or cooling, precut to size not even auto tailored.

Her spex were thin film wrap-arounds, frameless except for the temple pieces. She didn’t like watching video while she was walking so the news was audio only, just the base spex menu riding in the upper left corner of her vision. She left them set untinted so her face was fully visible.

Her features retained some of the soft look of childhood and an arch of coppery freckles across her cheeks and nose were faint because she was never in sunlight. April’s reddish brown hair was cut short, boyish really by the current styles, with just enough on top to have a little shape, and clipped very short all around the sides. It wanted to flip up in front and she didn’t fight it, brushing the front up in a spiky line. The short hair made the gold pirate hoops she wore in her ears stand out.

Overall she looked like normal a thirteen year old, not far from her fourteenth birthday. She was short and slight framed like her father, but athletic looking not the awkward lanky look some teens have until they fill out. Her appearance would not be changing as quickly as might be expected at her age because she had started basic life extension therapy three months ago.

Eventually the full treatment would slow down her visible aging even more as the therapies took hold. She’d only have the appearance of a sixteen or seventeen-year-old until she was about thirty. It was something she worried about. She was convinced as long as she looked young, her parents would continue to resist treating her like an adult no matter how she acted.  Life extension just voided all the visual clues of age people depended on to form their impressions of others. Her parents had grown up knowing how old, and supposedly how mature, anyone was at a glance. So she could picture them still talking to her like a twelve year old when she was twenty-five.

Bob her brother looked much older than April. He even shaved now, although he was only three years older. He had taken after their mom instead of Dad or Gramps so he was bigger. Her folks had only recently had the funds to start both their treatments, so Bob had to wait a few more years than she had. It might give her an advantage far in the future. But Bob’s older appearance was a huge advantage right now. An advantage she begrudged him due to her firm conviction he wasn’t really as mature as she was in many ways, and not nearly as honest.

Most everyone who worked away from home had a nine o’clock report time on main-shift if it was one of their workdays, so there was no line at the cafeteria and no big noisy crowd. At this hour, it was mostly youngsters like her and Heather who didn’t have a real job yet, retirees here to socialize, and people who were self employed like Heather’s mom who was an artist or Mr. Hathaway who was a writer.

The aroma of hot bread and fresh coffee brewing was strong at the entry. April usually came before the main shift rush, not after, so she was hungry and her stomach was growling at the smell of all the hot food. She ordered a huge breakfast and piled butter for her hot cakes, syrup, coffee, jam and orange juice on her tray off the self serve bar.

Now that she wasn’t walking she set the spex to show market and news alerts to the top left of her view. Her brother had gotten her into a medical stock a week ago.

It was up twenty percent and she was getting twitchy to sell it. She rarely rode them as far as Bob. He was either fearless or crazy when investing.

Getting a carton of milk was best done when her mother was not along to preach at her about junk food. The milk supposedly had all the antibodies and hormones filtered out now, and was checked for viruses and xenoprions. It wasn’t supposed to give you Beta Alzheimer’s or Crohn’s now, but her mom’s generation still didn’t trust it, feeling safer with soy milk.

April ordered heavily because her parents had done some significant gene tweaking when they had her. Her metabolism was capable of running at a higher pitch with correspondingly increased physical capacity and requirements.

Down below those that insisted there was a world shortage of food found her modification an abomination, snatching needed food from the mouths of the world poor. April had seen the hypocrisy of that even before her dad explained it. When the world’s poor had something worthwhile to trade, ships full of grain would race each other to make deliveries.

Her favorite cook and friend Ruby was working at the grill so she took her time saying good morning, chatting while she waited for her double stack of pancakes with four eggs over very easy on top. Ruby was tall and slender, with a dark chocolate complexion, shrewd eyes, and long thin fingers. She was full of nervous energy, always moving. She was too old to have a gene-modified metabolism like April but she appeared to be one of those people who ran on a natural overdrive. She always chatted with Ruby and the exchanges had progressed as she grew older. If business was slow Ruby would take her break when April came by and talk.

She had no success at all getting information out of her dad the same way. For some reason her dad clammed up when she asked anything, yet he kept the files and schedules for supply and maintenance wide open on the com console at home, not even password protected. It must not seem important to him, but April could find advantage in knowing anything not posted to a public board.

It was surprising how much you could infer about what else was going on in the station just by watching what people ordered, and April wanted to know everything that was going on. A desire increasingly frustrated because people seemed to be clamming up more than usual the last few months. People were tense and seemed to be hoarding supplies. The supply schedule gave her something to trade Ruby for information. April let her know when filler freight like gloves or hygienic wipes got bumped back a flight so she could get extra before they ran out.

It was a fair trade given the high quality of Ruby’s news. Almost everyone ate at the cafeteria, and Ruby was very observant. She was aware if a couple stopped coming in together or someone started meeting a new person. She probably had her finger on the pulse of the station’s social life better than anyone else April knew.

Seeing Ruby made April remember how valuable her information had been just a few month ago. What a mess things could have been without it…

* * *

            Her dad and grandpa were discussing the possibilities for the new Chief of Security. Her dad held out with Mitsubishi for the right to appoint the job locally. The last fellow they’d sent up had never adjusted to the culture and he didn’t want a repeat. She was in the living room supposedly reading but following every word they said, being a snoop as usual.

Both of them were favorably impressed with Eric Willard. April thought him a horrible sort of man. Well sure, he worked long hard hours, but for all the wrong reasons. He’d do just about anything to avoid going home. He couldn’t speak three words to his own boy without a fight resulting, and he didn’t get along with Mrs. Willard much better.

People like him were dismissive of children. After all why should he waste any courtesy on her? She had no power in his eyes. So he didn’t guard what he said around her like he would have if an adult had been close by. She had thus seen far too much of his true nature.

It had been no big surprise when Ruby saw Mrs. Willard chat and flirt all touchy on the fore-shift with the nice looking new construction foreman, then she left with him.

She just couldn’t stay silent and let them make such a mistake so she spoke up.

“Dad, Grandpa, honestly, you don’t want to make Mr. Willard Head of Security. If you do it will end as badly as the last one, and you’ll need a different guy anyway in just a few months.”

Her dad put on that patronizing look he wasn’t aware he used with her. “Why Sugar? Don’t you like Mr. Willard?”

“No, I do not like Mr. Willard,” she answered without apology. “He’s so hateful to anyone he thinks he can safely belittle that Security will be full of angry people in no time at all. He’s such a hopeless bully that he honestly thinks if he browbeats his people it makes them respect him and work harder. What’s more important is this ‑ Do you want a Security Chief who is too dense to know his wife is running around on him with the cute new construction foreman? Hmm?” she asked when there was no response.

She thought her dad was going to choke on the unexpected revelation, but her grandpa just quietly said, “I’ll look into it, Steve,” as if it was her dad’s idea all along to check it out. Later, privately, her grandpa thanked her.

“Thank you for not treating me like an idiot.” She hadn’t outright said it was in contrast to the way her father acted with her, or drawn a comparison with her brother.

“Well, I had to have my nose rubbed in it a few times before I was able to look at your dad as an adult,” he recalled. “You know, he’s really quite smart for someone who is not even forty yet.”  He smiled to show he was at least partially joking.

“Believe it or not, he really does remember you figured out it was the Lab Director who hoarded water when everyone else was looking for a leak. You should have seen his face when we went in the man’s apartment and saw the hot tub he had set up. Damn near filled up the whole place,” he showed with arms spread wide.

“I’ll work on it until he really listens to me,” she vowed.

“He will in time Honey. I know you’re a really bright young woman,” he assured her, and he gave her a double handed hug before he ambled off down the corridor.

* * *

            The platter deliberately clattered on the counter to break her reverie…

“Wake up Sweetie – time to stuff your face,” Ruby said with no malice at all. She turned away, busy, before April could thank her. April picked a table at the far wall, alone, far from the usual crowd which stayed close to the serving counter. She wanted some privacy to talk with Heather. The noises of dishes and utensils and others chatting close to the coffee machine was low this far away.

The overhead was all waffle board with little noise canceling nodes poked down through the overhead near the corners of the room. The walls were carpeted to mute the noise, and because it showed wear less than paint, which was so hard to refresh in a sealed environment. Best of all they didn’t inflict someone else’s taste in music on you here while you tried to enjoy your meal.

April invited friends to breakfast whenever she could, but she also had business with Heather this morning. She was putting pats of butter between the hot cakes, and had managed a quick bite of bacon, when Heather caught up with her. She hit the seat opposite like a shuttle that missed its docking collar. It was a good thing the table was bolted down solid. Somehow she managed to crash the tray down without spilling her breakfast.

“April” 2nd Chapter snippet

This is still story intro. April is introduced in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

            At the other end of M3 another agent of the USNA had also experienced some difficulty. He was in fact, one of the spooks Art had made in the shuttle coming up. Jon Davis, head of Security for M3 peered out of the clear shield of a biohazard mask examining the agent face to face so close most people would have found it very intimidating. Jon was a huge man with a bull neck and a sour expression on his face. The calm with which the agent ignored his scrutiny was due to the ballpeen hammer driven deep into the man’s forehead.

Finding a dead body on M3 was unusual. Finding two floating in the same maintenance space gave Jon indigestion. That one was a local really frosted him. He felt it a personal failure when one of his people came to harm. The strange dead guy was FBI, but there was no documentation on him to reveal that to Jon. He’d trained to do sneak and peeks years ago, and had loads of experience at them, but always as a team. He’d needed those team mates today in a strange environment but the expense of an orbital lift had made his bosses cut corners. He wasn’t leaking anymore. In fact he had contributed very little to the bloody mess of droplets floating in the air and wetting the walls. The other body, bagged and floating in the corridor now, had done most of the bleeding. Fortunately Security had responded and got the area sealed off fast enough they didn’t have to declare a biohazard emergency.

Jon’s assistant was busy vacuuming what blood wasn’t on the walls out of the air. He ignored her and was analyzing what happened here. Another team member was cleaning the wetted corridor walls already with antiseptic wipes and tossing them in a biohazard bag. They’d still run a check on the blood to make sure neither man was an unwitting bio-weapon.

The loose access panel had floated on the ventilation currents halfway down the corridor to the lift by the time they arrived. The recessed service space the panel covered was a massive run of parallel cables and fiber bundles. Most of them ran between offices and sections internally, but some went from here to various antennas and transmitters on the outside of the non-rotating hub. It was pretty safe to assume the dead man was responsible for a number of slim clip-on bugs installed over those cables, except for the one Jon found floating loose beside him.

“Margaret!” Jon called. “I want Eddie here – right now, and get us a couple freight boxes up here for these two,” his nod included the bagged shape floating beside her. “I don’t want people to see them on the way to the infirmary cooler in body bags and the news to get out before we have a handle on this.”

“Also get our police curtain down on the corridor ends when we’re clean and put up a maintenance barricade instead. Get Jack’s supervisor here to do that and I’ll break it to him his man is dead and ask for his cooperation to keep it quiet.”

“Sixty people will know it before the shift is over,” Margaret predicted.

“That’s fine. We won’t ask they keep it a secret forever, just ask them not to leak it Dirtside, and wait to tell the story around here for a couple days. The less you ask of people the more likely you’ll get it.”

“I’ll ask Denise to bring a helper too,” Margaret said, “and Maintenance can take them to the cooler. If anybody sees Security pushing a big box around it will raise as many questions as using a body bag. Does he have family on 3?”

“No, we lucked out there. Jack had no close family living, just some cousins and an older aunt down in Mexico. He was from some little town in the Baja and never was very close to them. I happen to know because he worked out with some of us Wednesday evenings and we’d chat waiting turns. Whoever this slime-ball is,” he indicated the corpse floating before him,” he probably never thought he’d be interrupted, and if he was he would have never guessed the fellow surprising him would be a hard case ex-Marine. Big mistake,” he enunciated sharply.

Margaret didn’t even bother to agree. The old fashioned sixteen ounce ball pien hammer half buried in the man’s forehead spoke for itself. His eyes were open and he just looked relaxed with his mouth slightly open like he had finished considering some question and might reply.

“I have all the visible stuff sucked up. I’d like to burn an Iodine vapor bomb so we can drop the curtain and turn the ventilation back on.”

“OK,” Jon approved, going through the dead man’s pockets and putting each item in a separate evidence bag as he had the gun and bug found floating free when they arrived. “Take a sticky pad and collect residuals off his hands and feet before we bag him. Be sure to label them right and left. I want him bagged before we contaminate him with the disinfectant.”

“My right and left or his right and left?” Margaret asked with a little edge in her voice.

Her sarcasm brought him out of his concentration enough to realize he’s spoken to his best detective like she was a six-year-old.

“Sorry, I know you know procedures. I’m kind of running my mouth on autopilot,” he admitted.

“You want a dust and pix on the hammer handle too?”

Jon took the time to look at her face to see if she was still needling him or serious. “Go ahead. I don’t think he shot Jack for his hammer and then smacked himself in the head, but you know – some idiot just may ask if we checked it down the road. Damn lawyers are great at bringing silly theories like that up in court. Or someone may suggest a third party was involved, which is more believable. After you image it go ahead and pull it. It would be damn awkward bagging him with it sticking out. I have pix of it in situ.”

At the end of the corridor there was a sharp whistle. That could only be one person. They both glanced. About forty meters away a man made a final check on his face mask and unzipped the flimsy bubble airlock in the plastic film barrier at the cross corridor.  He gently pushed himself off the plastic to avoid damaging it and then launched himself toward them very aggressively from a take-hold on the wall. When he got near he propelled a couple broken down foam boxes to Margaret. They had old UPS stickers on them.

“Theo said you needed these and I have a roll of tape too,” Eddie said muffled by the mask he wore. He stopped himself by hand and flipped over and took a toe hold while he patted his pockets to find the roll. By that time Margaret had the box folded open and looked dismayed. It was about a meter cube to hold a two meter body. I think you’ll have to bend him knees against his chest and tape him like that to fit him in,” he suggested looking at the body bag. “He isn’t stiff yet is he?”

“He isn’t even cold yet,” Margaret snapped suddenly angry.

“What happened? Who is this?” he pointed at the bag, knowing her anger was nothing personal, just frustration.

“Jack from maintenance. A young Mexican fellow, cable jockey, who’s been up about two years.”

“Crap, I knew him,” Eddie said, upset now too. “He played guitar sometimes when there was a party. Who’d want to hurt him?”

Jon swung aside to answer that, uncovering the corpse floating behind him. Eddie took that in and even through the mask his face looked sick.

“Exhibit B,” Jon offered. “Listen to Jack’s call.” He pulled his pad and spoke so softly to it Eddie couldn’t hear.

“Security I have a panel loose and somebody in restricted space.” Jacks indignant voice came out of Jon’s pad fairly loud.

There was a sheet metal sound and a ghost’s voice said, “Take your hand off the mic.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Jack’s angry voice demanded. “Oh shit,” and there was a soft cough and a thud of something hitting the corridor wall at the same time. Then a pause of almost a full second, and a grunt of great exertion that could have been either man, followed quickly by a sharp >Smack< sound. Then after another pause, “Got you too jackass,” Jack said in a barely audible voice.

“The way I make it,” Jon explained, “Jack saw the panel was out of flush a hair because the cam lugs were not turned down to draw it in like the others. He stopped and could hear somebody inside. Nobody legit would pull the panel back over them like that and work in the dark, and if somebody was here in the same section working they’d have told him when they sent him out. That’s a basic safety rule.”

“Instead of leaving and calling us from around the corner in a cross shaft where the guy wouldn’t hear him he just keyed his mike and called us right here. Not the smartest thing to do in hind-sight but he certainly didn’t expect an armed intruder. The fellow hears him call in and knocks the panel away and tries to stop him transmitting. As soon as he doesn’t submit the fellow here drew a gun to silence him.”

“Jack sees the pistol coming up too late, says ‘Oh shit,’ and gets hit high on the left chest with a frangible round that takes a big hunk out the back of his shoulder. He’s spun around, undoubtedly sees the huge mess on the wall behind him as he turns past and knows he’s a goner and has seconds to act.”

“His left arm is useless, but Jack was right handed and he pulls his hammer out of his tool belt and throws against his spin with everything he’s got. Throws it like a tomahawk, and gets it right the first time.”

“Sure did,” Eddie agrees, “this Earthie would have never believed somebody hurt and spinning in zero G could throw that accurately. He’d have put a couple more rounds in him as he turned if he’d had any idea. What the heck was he doing anyway?”

“I was hoping you could tell me, my techie friend. Take a look in here,” he invited Eddie. “It appears he had these all installed except this one,” he pulled the last slim wafer with a clip out of his pocket. “Are you familiar with how this kind of bug works?”

“No, this is beyond my level of expertise. I can’t imagine it stores the intercept. Even with the latest high density memory it couldn’t hold more than a few hours, and data intercept is perishable, it loses value hour by hour.” He took the device from Jon’s hand and looked at it silently and thinking.

“Got an imager that sees in the infrared?” he asked.

“Margaret does.”

Eddie accepted the device from her and looked at the free piece, then at the ones clipped in the cables.

“They’re warm. They have an internal power source – isotopic probably. I’d say they perform a data mining operation and then transmit the nuggets at intervals. We’re talking big government agency stuff here too, not any private investigator.”

“How could they do that with traffic on the line?” Margaret asked.

“They can analysis the traffic and predict when there will be a pause. The error correction routines will cover if they interfere with an occasional packet. I could do the same thing without any deep analysis – just transmit at coffee break on the off shift and you’ll likely be clear of any live traffic. If you accidentally garble a vending machine reporting inventory or something it will just send it again.”

“But why not listen to our stream Dirtside where they have massive capacity and can process the whole thing?” Jon wondered.

“They probably do, but they’d want to hear our internal chatter too for certain critical subjects. If they diverted all our internal comm below it would double the bandwidth on external transmissions and somebody would notice.”

“So, you wouldn’t expect some other agent to come replace these or mess with them as long as they are transmitting as expected?”

“Not unless they are really paranoid about the fact this fellow doesn’t return,” Eddie indicated with a shift of his eyes. “We can put a camera here to catch anyone servicing them, but we had better install this last bug ourselves. As dependable as this sort of device is the agent having an accident and one of the bugs going bad might be too much to swallow.”

“Good, I want the people who did this to think they pulled it off clean and his death was unrelated. I want them to mess up and ID themselves. I very much want to know who invaded my jurisdiction and hurt my people. So we need to arrange a very plausible accident for this gentleman in about a day, and you need to decide on which feed the last device should be installed.”

“I need somebody from communications to help me pick the last cable, but we can do them one better,” Eddie offered. “I can install our own sensors beside their taps and tell what they are mining. We’ll capture their transmission when we know there is no traffic from us. That should be interesting don’t you think?”

“That might tell us who the players are even if nobody claims the body,” Jon predicted with an evil smile.

“April” First Chapter Snippet

Building on Prologue posted last – book is done at 200k words. A big fat book.

Chapter 1

            Art checked the time again. It was 09:27, Sunday, Oct 3, 2083. He was finally past the three day hold he’d been ordered to endure and to able take his mission active. He was tired of wandering the boring corridors or eating in the cafeteria watching these irritating people, unable to say anything to them about their antisocial acts. Patience wasn’t something that came easily to him.

He’d suspected two of the other passengers in his shuttle as likely fellow agents, but no one had contacted him and he’s seen neither of them these three days.

He stepped out of the elevator with careful little steps, taking the measure of the acceleration on this deck. The clumsiness he experienced changing weight every time he stepped out on a new level was starting to wear him down because it seemed beyond him to acclimate to it. It was doubly irritating because he’d done so well in zero G.

The attitude of people was wearing him down too. At home he was used to civilians being afraid of him in uniform, especially when they saw the gray shoulder patch that said he was on interservice loan to Homeland Security.

This corridor was at a nominal half G, the lowest used for habitation, and he picked up speed warily as he turned with spin and headed for the elevator down to the next deck which would be about 70% G.

He’d circled all around his target’s apartment, making sure he had a clear mental picture of what surrounded it in three dimensions not trusting the blueprints he’d studied to be current. The Singh kid wasn’t home. He’d made sure he was starting breakfast at the cafeteria when he’d quickly ended his own breakfast and left. The boy had stayed away from the apartment returning late every day so far.

If only the father had taken his son when he went off station, it would have made his mission much easier. The boy was sixteen, still a minor, so it was illegal abuse under USNA law to leave him at home alone, but Singh hadn’t boarded him out or hired a sitter while he was gone. As far as he could tell reading the directory there wasn’t any care facility for teens on the habitat, and no commercial sitting services. They seemed to just ignore quite a few laws that were taken for granted below. It had shocked him at first and he didn’t understand why his briefing hadn’t spelled out how different it was on the hab. It was like a different country.

The schedule for the nanoelectronics conference the father was attending at ISSII said he’d be gone over a week and Art’s superiors somehow knew the man would be staying on after it ended too. A number of sentences started but not finished and significant looks between his superiors convinced him there were a lot of details they hadn’t felt it necessary to share with him.

The father’s workplace was definitely off limits. He had stretched his orders yesterday and done a light surveillance of the Lucent Lab where Singh worked as part of his ‘acclimation’. Their security was as tight as the rest of the station was lax. Not only electronic, but armed guards at a single choke point entry. There was no way was he getting in there without a court order to open up in his hand.

Art was going as fast as he felt safe to shuffle along touching the wall tentatively and was slowing down to turn the corner when he heard a colophony of shrill voices and the rapid scuff of little feet overtaking him. He stopped short of the corner his back to the wall and waited to see what was passing him.

Four local children went by with a floating gait, graceful as antelope in slow motion. Chattering over each other in a strange slang so fast and loud that he couldn’t figure out what any one of them was saying. They all looked to be eight to ten years old and dressed bizarrely. Not a one of them would have made it through a security gate at a school or mall in North America looking like that without being turned away or held and their parents called. Not that they were technically illegal, but Neighborhood Defenders considered community standards too, not just the letter of the law, and eccentric appearance was disruptive. That they might have their own community standards was something beyond Art’s rigid world view.

All of them were shamelessly bare legged in shorts with sticky footies. They all had expensive spex on even though they were little kids. Letting kids wear expensive stuff in public was just begging for them to be robbed or worse. At least it was down below. Only one of them had gloves on while they were out touching every grubby call button and take hold in the public areas as if they were safe in their own homes, and there was not a mask, knee pad, elbow pad or head protection of any sort to be seen on any of them while they were out running wild in the public corridor.

Not only were they completely unescorted by an adult and half naked for any perv or terrorist out prowling around to snatch but the one in the lead didn’t have any sort of shirt on at all. The reason for that was obviously to show off the colorful dragon drawn curled across his belly, under his left arm, up the back and looped over the shoulder with its snarling head staring at him with boggled eyes and open jaws.

When they passed the one in front with the dragon spun around in mid leap to take a look back at him, and his face was very Oriental with strong epicanthal folds on the eyelids. The motion threw out long braided pigtails startling him. A bare breasted boy was bad enough, but surely they wouldn’t let a little girl go out in public with no top on! Unless they allowed long braided hair on a boy…He couldn’t decide which would be worse. The thought was so shocking he gasped at the audacity of it, either was indecent, and the tattoo! That was beyond the pall.

He certainly hoped that was a fake. He couldn’t imagine a child having a real tattoo. At least he hoped it was just body markers and would fade out in a week or so. Earthside you might let your boys swim topless if you had your own very private pool, and some folks would mind their own business if they found out. But if you tried that in public, even if they were escorted, Family Services would have them in custody in a heartbeat for endangerment, and you’d be on trial for neglect. Lately, public sentiment was such that even short sleeved shirts were frowned on in really conservative areas. Some restaurants would refuse you service in shorts or short sleeves, adult or child.

The middle children ignored him in passing, but the last child in line seeing the front runner look back kicked off the deck like a ballerina en Pointe and made a lazy turn in the half G examining Art with the tactless stare children use. It was hard to tell, but this one also appeared to be a girl although the hair was shorter and she was strikingly Caucasian with corn silk blond hair and bright blue eyes.

She threw her arms out to slow her spin enough to look Art over better and on her forehead the shiny cabochon of a Public Eye lens on a headband looked him over too. That was not-something-he-wanted, to be on a video archive somewhere. Maybe her folks made her wear it for her protection even if they were crazy enough to let her out of the house alone. In that case, he could hope the vid would scroll off private storage in a few days.

She pulled her arms in to spin faster and landed just in time to join hands with her friends to the front as the lead kid grabbed a take hold bar and swung the whole line of his friends around the corner. The arched line of them swung around the corner in a crack the whip maneuver that Art would not have believed possible if he hadn’t seen it. The end girl curled up and hung on against the snap double handed by stretching back out to ease it. So comfortable with the gymnastics that she took time to look over her shoulder at him like he was the strange one here. Somewhere on the other side of the corner she must have found a take hold and the line disappeared from his view in a reverse maneuver.

By the time he eased around the intersection they were gone from sight and just their voices echoed down the empty corridor. They looked like a bunch of savages, he thought. Even the kids in the Arabic Protectorate weren’t as bold when he’d done patrol there. These kids looked at you without a trace of fear on their faces. He found that really offensive.

Down a level on the elevator and along the corridor at a new rhythm brought him to his target’s door. Not only was there not a visible camera on the residence hallways, there was no real security system on the door either, just a taste and code lock. It never occurred to him that cameras were deliberately visible only for the intimidation factor.

Naval Intelligence had used a government inserted back door to get him the entry codes off the habitat’s computers. He could have cracked such an easy entry himself, but he had learned early to not display too many skills or his instructors asked where he had acquired them. His small hobby of burglary as a teenager had never been discovered or he’d have never been accepted into the service for anything but scut duty.

The same caution had kept him from asking the experienced fellows about the prospects of liberating souvenirs on missions. All he needed was one self righteous straight arrow blabbing to ruin the game he had planned.

Art pulled his pad off his belt and ran it around the hatch edges checking for hidden security systems with his military plug-ins. If he somehow alerted the station security he had a set of get out of jail free documents in his pouch. That wouldn’t be the way to impress his superiors on his first solo though, to need bailed out. His briefing had emphasized – if you can’t achieve your objectives, withdraw without making our activities known. In other words – don’t screw up. If they wanted to draw public attention to the investigation they’d just walk in with warrants, not send in an operative.

            He pushed the call button just to be sure there was nobody inside. If it was linked to somebody’s phone he’d ask for the wrong name. After a pause he punched the stolen numerical code in and the door opened without a hitch. He stepped through into the dark, closing the door, and pulled a small light out. There didn’t seem to be any manual light switch near the door so he took another chance and said aloud, “Lights up.” They came on full without any alarm even at a strange voice, so he was encouraged. Even in a walled and gated community Earthside this place would have never lasted a week without being robbed by somebody, maybe a grade school kid. It was hard to believe that anything of value could be in such an insecure place.

He took a deep breath happy to find he still got that deep thrill of being in a forbidden place he’d had as a teenager, even if he did have government sanction now. The place was ridiculously small for the home of a well paid and important worker. Everything he’d heard on Earth was these people were all rich, and here this nano-electronic engineer was living in an apartment the size of his parents garage. He was starting to doubt he’d find anything worth boosting for himself while he was here.

A quick walk through was in order. The house com console was an unlikely place to keep anything really sensitive. Most of its memory resided in the network and it could never be made sufficiently secure. Of the two tiny bedrooms the first obviously belonged to the teenage son with very casual clothing and a mess of study papers and printouts on the desk. The kid was a pack-rat with boxes of junk and electronic parts piled in the corner and bottom of the closet. Some sports equipment was piled on the unmade bed and a mound of visibly dirty footies and grimy socks was piled by the desk.

The father’s room looked like the jackpot with an actual stand alone computer. He cut all data feeds in and out and sealed the ventilation as he’d been trained. There was still no alarm, so the environmental controls depended on positive reporting, not fail safes. The shoe box size computer unit was optical fibered to the wall screen instead of wireless, and had no network connection at all. That was damn suspicious for a computer able to do some complex modeling. Who monitored his usage if it was off line?

His briefing had not told him explicitly what he was seeking. He was to bring any and all technical materials and computer memory out with him and let somebody else evaluate it. The computer looked like the target, but first he did a general toss of the room. He took his general purpose tool out and used the pliers to get a grip on the carpet in the corner and systematically pulled it all up. He pad-scanned the mattress and pillows but used his knife and slit them open just to be sure. There were some old fashioned hard print codex books and he riffled them and all he got was a few personal photos and old receipts that might have simply been bookmarks. They were all commercially published so nothing he’d want even if technical.

There was little clothing but he pulled each piece off the hangers and the few with pockets he either searched or simply squeezed the pocket to feel for anything. There was a hard copy file with some legal papers and some currency with writing in a language he didn’t know. It was all non-target material but in the bottom there were three small gold coins, and this was just the sort of personal bonus he had hoped would be common when he applied for training. He carefully sealed them in a pocket, somewhat satisfied.

He wanted to be able to exit immediately once he dealt with the computer so he took a moment to relieve himself. He used the toilet and returned to the bedroom and made a simple line drawing of a laughing seal with a globe of the world balanced on its nose, and the barest simple outline of the Americas on the sphere. No point in having this much fun and not intimating who tossed their place. It was always good to sow a little fear.

It didn’t directly violate his orders he reasoned – since they had to infer that the seal was meant to be a SEAL. He wasn’t going to draw any anchors around the globe or anything blatant. He drew it right on the big thin screen on the wall, ruining the plastic surface with the vacuum marker, ignoring the little voice in his head that said this was a bad idea.

He was finally ready to do the computer and get out of here. A quick check with the pad showed no outgassing from any explosives and there was no signal being sent over the power cord. It shouldn’t have an alarm or booby trap. He took the multi-tool and snipped the optic fiber. If disconnecting the power raised some sort of alarm he would immediately trot out the door with the whole box under his arm. It was a normal push and twist plug at the wall, but no connector at the case, so he unplugged it and then immediately cut the cord almost flush with the case. Still no alarms, so he relaxed another small increment and pulled a chair up to crack the box open for the memory.

The case was a little taller than wide and he used his multi-tool to take the fasteners out of the two top corners. Then he tipped it on its side to raise the bottom corner where it was easy to get at. There was a sort of boiling sound he could feel through the case and he immediately felt heat on his face. He jumped up in a panic, so hard he left the deck in the low G, knocking the chair over behind him, and whipped the box back upright, but it was too late.

There was a plum size ball of white hot molten steel already melted through the side of the case before he could tip it back. It was far too hot to look at so he had purple flash blobbies floating before his eyes before he could look away. Art had heard of thermite before in training, but never seen what it really looked like first hand. The composite counter top was holding up better than the metal computer case had but it was sizzling, melting a crater, and giving off lots of smoke.

The horrible plastic fumes were already making his flash shocked eyes water. There was a plastic waste basket under the desk and he grabbed it running for the shower in the tiny bathroom, desperately muttering, “Shit, shit, shit,” all the way. The flow was good and he had an almost full waste basket in seconds.

Rushing back in the ball was visibly lower in the counter top and he tried not to look directly at the glare of it. It was not through yet, the low G was helping him there, and he sloshed a big splash of water across it. The steam that flashed back rolled up the wall to join the layer of gray smoke fanning out across the overhead, burning his hand holding the rim of the basket badly enough to make him jump back.

There was a drawer underneath the shelf the molten metal was eating through and he yanked it open and hastily dumped the rest of the water in it on top of the pencils and pens and things, and slammed it shut. The steam that had flashed up condensed on the cool bulkhead immediately, where it ran back down cutting clean streaks through the soot, and pooling like ink on top of the counter. He ran back to the shower coughing at the burnt plastic smell and filled his improvised bucket again. Behind him he heard the sudden hiss as the white hot mass fell in the drawer with a layer of water in the bottom.   By the time he ran back in it had melted through the pens and such then the bottom of the drawer before he could get the waste basket under it. The water in the drawer poured out slowly in the low G right on top of the diminished but still molten ball. That was a lucky accident he hadn’t foreseen, but it helped a lot that all the water was directed right where he needed it. He slowly poured the new pail of water on it too, forcing himself not to pull back when the steam billowed up even though it made him gasp and cough. At last it eased off until it was simply making a sizzling boiling sound instead of the breathy sound of steam flashing.

When he’d dribbled the last of the water out he stepped back and tossed the empty waste basket on the bed. He hands were shaking from the realization he had barely stopped it before it melted through the deck into the next apartment. As it was the metal decking slumped around the dull lump so it was a close thing. He poked it with his toe, but it was welded tight to the metal deck. It was still hot enough it boiled off an expanding dry circle around itself as he watched, water fizzing on the expanding circle between wet and dry.

He glanced up at the seal and globe he’d drawn. Maybe that hadn’t been the very best idea, but it was too late now. He certainly wasn’t going to try to roll up the big thing and take it with him. He stumbled back to the bath again, pulling the bedroom door shut behind him to close off as much of the stink as he could. He turned the shower on dead cold, and very low flow, adjusting it to a fine mist. He stripped his glove and held his burnt hand in that cold spray as long as he dare. At least no skin had come off with the glove. He stepped back and stripped as quickly as he could, the burnt hand slowing him. The shower mist in the small room cleared the stink from the air pretty well. He soaped up his sooty face left handed, checking it in the mirror set at face level in the stall. He tried to ease on a little warmth in the spray, but as soon as it hit his burnt right hand he gasped and turned it back cold. It was a bright pink, but he decided it wouldn’t blister or peel right away. Once he looked presentable he eased the blow dry on and stood shivering as the stall flushed with warm air, holding his right hand above his head out of the direct flow.

He was recovering enough to be angry now. If he had some bobby trap of his own he’d gladly leave it but his superiors had debated at length before allowing him just a pistol and frangible rounds. He was sure they had come close to sending him unarmed. Right now he was so hot he would have cheerfully left a nuke for these damn people if he had one. Somehow, he had to get back and get a piece of these people another time – to even up the score.

It was awkward to dress one handed. His shirt was so sooty he decided it would be less obvious inside-out than filthy. But the air in the tiny living area was not too bad when he went out. It didn’t make his eyes water and burn as they had in the bedroom. He punched for the door to open, called lights down, stepped through, and locked the door from outside with the number code again.

He was just happy not to meet Fire and Rescue responding in the corridor. Back at the Holiday Inn, he’d get some ointment from his kit on the burnt hand and some fresh gloves. Well, he thought. How in the hell am I going to write this up to sound like it wasn’t a total screw up?

 

Prologue to the book “April”

As an alternative to the last two previous snippets posted about alien contact, I have a book further along about a space habitat set in a much closer time frame. Here is the opening prologue for that book:

 

APRIL

by

Mackey Chandler

Prologue

September 12, 2083 – Boise, Idaho

            Colonel James Harris, USNA Aerospace Forces watched the vendor’s team fussing over the MNQR and checked the time again anxiously. His commander liked to write orders that read like the one he was operating under today: “You will be prepared for a test at 1400 Zulu.” These civilians seemed to take that to mean, “It would be nice if you could…” They made him nervous with the cabinet still open, when less than seven minutes remained on the clock until the scheduled test run.

The new and very highly classified device they were examining didn’t offer all that many possibilities for a catchy acronym, but they were making do with pronouncing it as Moniker. The Multiverse Neutrino Quantum Receiver. He understood it was at its heart a quantum computer. That was about all he understood. He wasn’t an ignorant man or a technophobe but when they tried to explain how it worked the whole idea sounded just  irrational to him.

How it worked might be exotic, but anyone could understand what it was supposed to actually do. It was the same as radio, a way to transmit information, but with a different media. It detected a neutrino flux with a sensitivity that was similar to how their conventional receivers detected ordinary electromagnetic radiation.

Where before a neutrino detector required a huge tank of fluid buried deep underground, and could barely sense a source of the elusive particles, this new device detected the sum of events in an unknown but vast number of  parallel devices. That’s where they lost him. When he had asked what the transmitter was like that produced those pulses they had brusquely informed him he had no need to know, that was another group’s concern.

The unit they were testing was not an experimental set, but the first generation portable unit that, hopefully, a military techie, a rating, could set up and use in field conditions. They had the first group of ratings observing today.

After much discussion a civilian technician latched down the cover on the equipment much to Col. Harris’ relief. Three large elevated screens let everyone in the room see what was happening. A clock in the corner of the center screen showed less than two minutes to the first scheduled transmission. People stopped moving about, grabbed seats, and all the murmuring died away in anticipation.

The counter in the corner of the screen reached zero and right on cue a series of spikes scrolled in the upper right corner of the screen. That raised a murmur of satisfaction among the technical crowd. The spikes changed from a constant series and started having gaps among them. The left screen started representing this variation as blocks of ones and zeros. The last display interpreted the timing of the pulses received as spatial information. On a see through representation of the Earth, continents looking like they were embossed on a glass globe, a tetrahedron formed through the globe between the three detectors and the transmitter. Unless there was an island in that part of the Pacific he wasn’t familiar with, they must have it on a ship. Today they were building on previous successful tests and trying to tweak the bandwidth a little wider.

“We don’t have any drop outs here,” the chief researcher said over the open network. “All three receivers check against each other…What’s that?” he interjected.

On the crystalline representation of the globe, the three lines marking the cords between the receivers and the transmitter were flickering. When they faltered  three new lines were drawn  forming a pyramid with a new apex off the location in the Pacific, and indeed off the Earth’s surface slightly into near space.

“What the hell?” the head honcho started, and then it was as if his question itself triggered a response. The wave forms flowing so smoothly seconds before dissolved in a meaningless hash on the screen, and the data scroll ended.

While the man stood, open mouthed, one of the rating, carefully kept back from the current activity spoke up. “That’s jamming. I’ve seen the same thing in satellite  controlled UMVs, Run your gain way down and you might be able to localize it.”

Nobody replied to the lowly fellow, but several lab coated civilians got their heads together and started entering something manually on a keyboard. Some of the numbers on the screen started a slow scroll down, and abruptly the globe reappeared and the data resumed with all ones imposed, but the directional lock was lost.

“It’s a 400 MHz buzz,” the one technician reported without turning around. “Not nice clean pulses either but spikes, dirty spikes with quite a bit of variation, but no deliberate drop outs like we were inserting.”

Recovering, their boss found his composure again. “See if you can get the receivers to compare variations and get a directional lock.”

The underlings played at it, selecting various length packets until they approached near a millisecond in length to reacquire, and the three lines reappeared pointing to a spot in the sky. Further refining narrowed its location down to about twenty meters. They opened a smaller window scaled to show detail and watched, quietly arguing with each other and making hurried calls to the other receiver teams. “We can write a specific program for it later to get a closer fix on the location – narrow it down off the recorded data too if we want,” one fellow announced. The track on the screen was following an orbit, but it was wobbling like a badminton shuttlecock that was broken.

“Jim, can you get your boys to check what is at that location we’re stacking? Here’s an address to tap into the running data,” he offered, showing his pad.

He spliced his office into the feed and listened intently to the quick reply from Space Command Tracking before he turned to the waiting scientists.

“The elements you are feeding them are a dead match for the habitat Mitsubishi 3,” That produced a lot of indignation and several outright objections.

On the screen, the strong emissions ended much more abruptly then they had started.

“The Japanese? The Japanese can’t even make the…uwff!” One of them got cut off by an associate’s elbow before he could say too much.

“I find it real hard to believe they have even a transmitter, much less a receiver,” he told the one who cut him off, holding his ribs. Both of them glared at each other. “To speak of them being so far ahead they are designing powerful jamming devices is ridiculous.”

The lowly young soldier who had suggested it was a jammer spoke up. “Doesn’t mean it was designed as a jammer,” he pointed out. “My wife has an old  hair dryer at home – no intent involved at all – but when she runs it – it jams the hell out of the TV.”

They looked at each other with new purpose, and still no acknowledgment of his help.

“So,” one said slowly, “we need to define all the categories of devices that might generate such a signal as an unintended consequence,” he very tentatively proposed.

“Don’t worry on it too much son,” Colonel Harris told him. “Mitsubishi 3 may sound Japanese but it’s the American subsidiary of the company that built number three, so it’s under USNA law.  I’d say long before you can think-tank a list of what it could be somebody will simply go take a look-see and we’ll know exactly what’s causing the fuss.”

And generations later…

The world of aliens with a racial memory described in the prologue posted last meet men. Those with the advantage of perfect memory have spread through the world and subdued it. It would be a very homogenous society but accidents still happen. Can those with damaged memory survive?

Handicapped

            Generation 27 of the new Third Bloodline peered through the fronds of a fern-like leaf at the new clearing. Her skin was a tiger strip of black and bright green with just enough dapples of yellow and orange to break up the pattern and mimic the blossoms on the air plants that hung everywhere. A smaller copy of her camouflaged visage, Generation 28, looked from behind her shoulder, gripping a fighting arm for reassurance. The way she clung was a step back from the healthy independence she had just started to show. If any of her sisters had added a generation 29 word had not reached her yet, but she was close to breeding age.

She was terribly fond of her young daughter. She didn’t have what human’s considered a name, just the twenty-eighth generation daughter who lived in the big valley beyond the wide river on the edge of civilization, and a mental picture of her unique pattern of tiger stripes and spots. Even the valley and the river had no name beyond being associated with all the visual true memories since the first Sister walked up to its banks and saw it. Everybody knew what you meant by the river unless you made a point of saying the old river across the mountains where our mothers used to live. That did not mean they were simple or any less given to discussing deep questions than humans. They had three times as many words for rank, status, and social standing as humans used. And while theft of personal items like a spear or necklace was unknown, theft of real estate was a very serious problem. One that was usually associated with murder of the owner.

She reached awkwardly across herself with a small unclawed feeding arm and gave a reassuring pat to the delicate long fingers curled around her muscular lower arm.

“No dear,” she assured her daughter quietly, “I know this isn’t anything at all like we have a true memory of, for all that is worth.”

The rumble of a bulldozer pushing dirt toward them made them confident they could speak safely with privacy. The horrible racket had awakened them at first dawn vibrating through the earth more than the air. But here in sight of the strange monster the air was so thick with its noise they both folded their ears down flat in discomfort and squeezed their ear orifices almost closed. Their overall appearance was strongly reptilian, with a smooth slightly pebbled skin capable of color changes, but the ears were huge scooped affairs worthy of a fox. Another of the strange things had flattened the top of the hill removing all vegetation and pushed a collar of protective dirt around both sides of the huge egg sitting part way down the slope. But the near one was steadily pushing a ridge of  dirt parallel to the unpaved track marking their territory.

It was a relief that this new thing apparently recognized the treeless trail marked ownership and was not to be ignored. The same sort of trail to their left that marked another Sister’s territory was getting the same respect. Where the two boundary trails turned away from each other, the long pile of dirt had turned with each leaving a small triangle of neutral ground about fifty paces on a side. Technically, they were on neutral ground too, on the outside of their perimeter walk. The strip that ran between them and their neighbor’s boundary roads was a free zone anyone could use to travel through between their territories, although neither neighbor kept it as free of small trees and hazards as the walkways to each side. Some might cheat taking the landowner’s walk to avoid pushing through the brush, and trust their ears and nose to duck back in the neutral center if someone came patrolling their land. But it wasn’t a smart idea and some were so surly they would turn and track you if they found strange scent or tracks along their road. On the inside of the road there was no question how to behave. An intruder there would be attacked without challenge or quarter. If that ridge of dirt was a boundary of sorts or would be flattened into a real perimeter road, they had even left a decent gap for a neutral zone, not trying to see how close they could come without a challenge like some pushy neighbors. Still, yesterday the land there had been unclaimed wilderness, and 27 had not thought anyone would be marking it off so soon. She  had rather hoped for her daughter to claim it and live next to her. That was a distressing hitch in her plans.

“Look, what are those?” 28 asked. Some things came from orifices in the egg which closed back up. They had the look of living things, flexible with proper arms and legs which the thing pushing dirt around did not have. She wondered briefly if the huge egg was somehow living also, but rejected it. It had that hard look of a made thing like the dirt pusher, although not the boxy shape. It didn’t squish out at the bottom from its weight and it had that hard shiny look like a rock that the dirt pusher had even though it’s shape was complex. Besides what living thing could lay an egg that big? It would be the size of a mountain. It was disturbing but somehow she was sure they were both made things as much as the spear in her hand.

“Whatever they are they at least have arms and legs even if they are short a pair,” 27 said lifting her heavy middle arms. The three middle fingers and two thumbs curled around the shaft of her weapon mirrored the symmetry of her finer feeding hands, but were not only short and less flexible but held long curved retractable claws that were not entirely under conscious control.

“They are carrying things!” her daughter exclaimed. Indeed the three creatures had a number of items hung on straps and clipped on belts. Two of them had items in their hands that seemed adapted to carry. 27 had never seen a handle and had no word for it. I suppose that is what you have to do if you don’t have enough hands, she thought to herself a little smugly. The third creature was colored much different in splotchy greens that reminded her of her own coloring much more than the bright colors the other two showed. There was something about the way it carried the single dark object before it that made her uneasy. It had an at-the-ready manner that reminded her of an irate landowner with a spear in each great hand.

“Do either of you fools have anything to do with this perversion?” A voice asked them from entirely too close.

27 slowly turned her head and forced herself not to take a step back. Her neighbor had joined them on the neutral strip so stealthily they had been unaware in all the noise. She was blended in the jungle plants and shadows perfectly not ten paces away, which was the purpose of their coloring after all, but she was shamed anyone could walk up on them undetected even with the roar of the dirt pusher and the overwhelming stink of raw dirt and crushed vegetation.

“We have no idea what this new thing is neighbor. We came to see when we heard. You we have seen passing on your patrol road of course.” She did not mention she had never slowed to exchange a greeting or news like neighbors sometimes did if they were civil. In fact she did not even know the Sister’s lineage she had been so stand-offish.

“Do you have any true memory of such creatures, Neighbor?”

“Indeed, I do. I am of the Eleventh Lineage of the Twelve and Generation 112,214 of my Line,” she bragged, “and we have memory of very similar creatures over 80,000 turns of the seasons ago. They had six limbs not four but they were all clawless grasping hands like you see there, because they were all tree dwellers and very tasty too. My line ate the last of them very quickly because they were such a treat and slow of wit.” She turned her head straight on so all four yellow eyes came to bear on them, the two on top of her bulging brain case and the two wide set in the hollows above her jaw hinges.

“They smell just as tasty as I remember too,” she said her nostril slits opening wide with no mannerly covering hand wasted on them. 27 wondered how she could smell anything over the earthy smell with a faint burnt tang to it even though she saw no open flames.

“And yet these seem to walk on the ground and are busy removing all of their trees instead of climbing in them, and it would seem very odd for witless beasts to carry so many made things,” her young daughter was brave enough to speak up and suggest to their neighbor.

“My error offering treasure of experience to…” Her words failed her not having one to describe her contemptible neighbors. “Has your egg mother told you why your heritage is as  short as a tree slug youngster?” she asked with her lips curling back in disgust showing shocking pink gums above a mouth full of shark’s teeth. “Or has she been too ashamed to tell you what sort of world you’ve been brought into?”

“I understand our mother of 27 eggs back was a story teller and went to the sea. She fell on the rocks and hit her head so hard it cracked and was even misshapen when it healed. If she lost much, she still remembered many old tales, which we remember quite well thank you,” she said defensively. I see nothing to hold any shame. We didn’t push our ancestor onto the rocks nor have we memories of eating our own Nest Sisters as I am told some Lineages must bear.”

“How dare you,” the nasty neighbor hissed, all the color draining from her face until it was gloss black. “The shame you should remember is the shame your mother should have felt knowing she was going to drop an egg with no legacy of memory passed on. If she had the mentality left to feel shame. The undamaged rest of the Third want no part of you I can tell you! She should have thrown herself in the sacred sea when she woke so damaged. Or at least had the sense never to wade in the river and expose herself to the males in season. She had to know she’d make some mental cripples with no heritage – no experience.”

“Every Line from the Mothers of the First Dozen Eggs started with no memory but her instruction,” 27 pointed out. “In a million turns of the seasons I doubt there will be all that much difference between us and the original twelve. They all survived through a twenty-seventh and twenty- eighth generation and muddled along on that skimpy heritage, so we will too,” she assured the prejudiced neighbor.

“If you survive,” their neighbor admonished. “There have been other defective Lines arising from the twelve because of injury or disease and I don’t remember one that lasted 1,000 seasons without the wisdom of their dames. And the Great Mother had to have many Sisters in which the True Memory didn’t awaken, yet where are they? They certainly didn’t compete having to learn everything anew each generation like the animals.”

“Agreed then, we’ll just have to see won’t we?” 27 replied, struggling to keep her lips relaxed, and happy she could still see the strips on her nose despite the taunts.

The bulldozer that had been industriously working back and forth stopped this time when it came up to the berm it was constructing and didn’t back up. There was a single round shape on a stalk that turned to them and the dark eye that looked at them was much like a water bug would turn to you before you snatched it from the rocks. It had that hard surfaced look rather than a wet eyeball, but none of them doubted it was an eye observing them. The creatures by the egg stirred, excited about something and the two bright ones abandoned the things they had carried out and started walking toward them. The one in mottled colors plucked at them trying to hold them back, but when he was holding one the other would advance and he couldn’t hold both at once. Of course the poor thing only had two arms. Finally giving up he seemed to decide if they were going to approach the jungle, he would be in front and hurried around them gripping the object he carried differently now.

“Well of course they are the road builders,” Jason told Edna. “If they weren’t they would stay well away from the track there, because it’s a good place to become prey.”

“I wish you could have at least taken time to go back in the shuttle and put on body armor and get a heavier weapon before approaching them,” Lieutenant Hamilton complained. “Look at the size of these creatures. I only come up to about that heavy middle arm, and I bet they cover a good two meter in one stride.”

“Ah, here comes lunch,” their older neighbor sighed. “There isn’t much meat to them it appears. I hope you don’t mind if I claim seniority of the hunt since this isn’t on either one of our territories?”

“Your privilege,” 27 acknowledged,   but I’m not sure these creatures don’t regard that ridge of dirt as their own boundary road. They could be going to go along and flatten it when they are done. They are so different, who is to say they don’t build things different too? But they seem intelligent to me using made things. If you cross that line they may be offended by your trespass.”

“Hah! As if I’d respect a boundary from such bite size stuff. We’re talking about a snack not people fools. I know you remember so little, but these tree dwellers often mimicked intelligent behavior. But one good roar and a charge and you’ll see they throw down any branch or rock they picked up and scatter in panic. If I’m too slow to snatch all three help yourself to a little snack. You’ll probably never get the chance again. I thought they were all extinct even on the edge of unsettled territory like this.”

“That doesn’t look like something they picked up off the forest floor,” 28 whispered to her mother. Now that they were closer, the shape the front one carried was complex. It had all kinds of boxy shapes and a large rod sticking toward them with a hole on the end like a reed when you snap it off to pick your teeth.

The three strange creatures were smaller than even the young daughter, but still bigger than most of the game they ran on their land. All the big game was only True Memories long hunted to extinction. The humans hung back behind the bulldozer that had fallen silent now, seeming to find comfort in the shelter.

“Man, look at the size of that sucker on the right,” the one in camo greens exclaimed.

“Oh! I didn’t even see that one,” the woman confessed.

“You better hope there aren’t another half dozen none of us see in the shadows,” he suggested.

“All the data we saw from orbit and from the drones was there were seldom more than one big animal in each marked territory,” Jason reminded them. He always had an opinion and was quick to share them. “I think we are looking at both our neighbors from those two plots behind them. One large creature in each well marked territory suggests they must be carnivores too. If they understand territorial marking, they may be smart enough not to come over our berm without some sort of invitation. Look, they all have spears. What I wouldn’t give to get one of those and see how the head is fastened on and from how far away the stone was collected!”

“Just stay close enough to get behind the dozer, and be ready to duck, because I don’t want to be pulling one out of your chest,” Lt. Hamilton told him.

“I’m going to see if I can communicate with some simple signs,” Edna informed them.

“Let me go up behind the blade, and you both stay back here until I’m in position,” Hamilton ordered them. “Then you can step out – but not more than two steps away from the back of the dozer and wave your cap or whatever the hell you think will amuse these monsters. They scare the crap out me,” he admitted.

“They’re beautiful,” Edna protested. “Look at the colors. I think I saw that big one ripple its stripes on its nose like a chameleon just now.”

“Uh huh,” Mark Hamilton agreed. He was estimating the big one must weigh about five hundred kilo or a bit more of it was anything like a bear internally. He dialed the projectile size on his gun up to 25 grams and left the velocity at max which would be about 1,200 meters a second. There was no way he could hang on to it dialed up like that at full auto so he dropped the bipod on the front over the dozer blade to absorb the recoil.

Even Jason was a little nervous now and took his laser pistol out and made sure the safety was off and the power set on high. Somehow, it didn’t seem sufficient protection anymore looking at the native from less than a hundred meters.

“Of course we want to avoid hostilities if at all possible,” Jason reminded them. “If we get on bad terms with these fellows we might have to even move to a new location to get somebody who will talk to us.”

“Uh huh,” the lieutenant agreed never taking his eyes away. He was more concerned with surviving the next ten minutes than long term relations.

“I’m going to ease a bit closer, slowly,” the crabby neighbor informed the mother and daughter. “You’d be surprised how close these tree dwellers will let you sneak up on them if you don’t move too sudden. I remember hundreds of successful stalks,” she explained as she edged away.

“Why does she keep insisting they are tree climbers, Momma?” 28 asked in frustration.  “We haven’t seen one in a tree and she already admitted the ones she remembers had six limbs instead of four.”

“Well daughter, I’m just like you. I don’t have the memories of a 100,000 ancestors rattling around in my head just as vivid as if I lived it myself. But from what I have seen these old ones have so much True Memory it’s hard for them to have an original thought of their own. It’s true our poor damaged Line mother was hurt so bad she had to be taught like a nest dwellers new chick who doesn’t know how to fly the first season, but these old ones seem to think there is never anything truly new, just variations on what they remember. Sometimes I think if they didn’t remember a Line Mother doing it they couldn’t squat and take a piss on their own.”

The big native the humans watched walk out of the ferns and brush moved slow and smooth, gradually standing up until it was on its hind legs. It had the hindquarters of a Kangaroo – built for hopping – and took exaggerated high steps to clear the thick bushes. The rear feet showed the digging claws with which it ripped encroaching small trees and bushes out of the ground on it’s boundary roads as it patrolled, and the rear had a single huge talon curved down that would let it perch like a bird or disembowel prey larger than anything they had seen with their sensors.

The lower set of arms were heavy with huge hands more like paws set on definite shoulders. The neck that came up from those shoulders was massive though, almost as thick as the torso below. In the front set closer together was another pair of much more delicate arms and dainty fingers sprouting from where the sloping shoulders blended into the neck, but naturally going up from those joints instead of down like the lower.  They were folded in front now unused in almost a prayerful gesture.

The eyes on top of the domed skull were foreword looking and in a crease that offered a little shelter. Below, another set of eyes just above the jaw joints were so far apart the creature must have near 270 degrees of vision. The muzzle was obviously a carnivore, fairly heavy, not slender like a crocodile, with the nostrils like a pair of curly quotes very active with the slits moving and the size of the upper snout suggested a huge volume for processing smell. The skin was finely textured without deep wrinkles and brilliant with camouflage that combined all the best elements of a tiger and a salamander. The mouth showed no teeth protruding when closed and any doubt of its intelligence was lost with the spear it carried in it’s middle hand, and the fact there were bracelets around both wrists of those heavier arms.

Edna stood where she had stepped out from behind the dozer frozen by the sight of the native free of any obscuring foliage. “It’s a dragon!” she exclaimed at the sight of the native uncovered by any vegetation. Finally, she remembered her purpose and held her hands up palms open to show they were empty of any threat. Unfortunately, the gesture was the same as a native used to display threat by spreading its fighting arms ready to slash. Although she lacked the proper claws, her fingers still did a pretty good imitation.

Number 112,214 of her line reacted with all the hardwired memory of seeing that threatening gesture thousands of times over the centuries. That such a puny creature would dare make the gesture was infuriating. She threw her own fighting arms wide in a threatening sweep claws unfolding in a deadly arch of black points. She dropped her spear as irrelevant. Weapons were for people not game, and screamed a response that ran off the high end of the human’s hearing into the ultrasonic. But the overpressure still painfully hammered on their ears. The size of her open maw of bright pink lined with rows of black triangular teeth was impressive. Edna, who had taken two long steps out from behind the dozer made it back to shelter in one leap.

Seeing the tip of her tail whip back and forth with increasing frequency, the lieutenant, who had owned many a cat who did the same before pouncing, instinctively knew that an attack was a virtual certainty now, and it was just going through the internal programming for the rush. He dropped the butt of his gun aiming well over the native anticipating her leap and was as scared as he had ever been on any score of nightmare worlds.

Behind the challenging neighbor, the mother and daughter were disappointed to see her crouch to spring. They didn’t know what these new things were but their neighbor was obviously too far gone in battle lust to stop, and both doubted if any of the small creatures would escape.

As the stripped shape threw itself across the ridge of dirt, Lt. Hamilton realized it would cover a third of the distance to them in one hop. He squeezed the trigger back pushing down hard to try to track that upward leap, but the front support came off the blade he used as a rest and the muzzle climbed free on full auto and tracked her better than he could have consciously. The line of bullets climbed up her front one round hitting right through the massive skull and the last three rounds cutting the empty air ahead of her before he could let off the trigger. In all six rounds as big as his thumb hit and warming from impact the memory metal in them expanded from a blunt cylinder to a mushroom with a 20mm diameter head. They exited her back making a wound you couldn’t cover with a flat hand. Even something the size of a small ground car could not survive such massive wounds, but the head wound alone was fatal.

The mother and daughter looked at the broken form of their neighbor laying sprawled in death in shock. They had not anticipated such a reversal. Their mouths hang open like a human in surprise. With their dentition, however, it was not a very friendly gesture.

Lt. Hamilton pushed himself off the front of the track where the recoil of his weapon had pushed him and brought it back down at the ready again on the top of the bulldozer blade.

“Please, please, please don’t do the same,” he softly begged aloud of the two still standing watching him from the other side of the dusty ridge. It was the first time he had ever shot an intelligent alien and he found it profoundly disturbing. Shooting humans had never hit him a badly as this. He was also shaken to realize if the dragon had not telegraphed what it was going to do he might not have been able to track and shoot it before it was on them. These things were fast! He really didn’t want to shoot the other two and have his name go in the history books as slaughtering the first contact on this world.

“I’m going to do something,” the mother told her daughter, “You stand still, and if it is the wrong thing and I die remember not to make the same mistake.” She lowered her fighting arms dropping the spear on the ground and held her small feeding arms up palms out, fingers spread, in the same gesture the bright colored two armed creature used.

Lt. Hamilton responded by moving the muzzle of his weapon slightly off center from pointing right at the bigger one’s torso.

“Well, that’s one thing learned,” she told her daughter nervously. “Now I’m going to see if she will let me take a step away if I do it again.” She made the same gesture and took a step back toward what she thought of as the safety of her territory. When she didn’t die in burst of thunder like her neighbor, she did it again.

“I think I’ve got it. Why don’t you try it and see if you can catch up with me here?”

The daughter copied the gesture and repeated step by step until she was back even with the mother. When they were all the way back out of the neutral zone on their own road they stopped. The three at the dozer had a discussion they could hear low and the two behind stepped out and repeated the open hand gesture and backed away toward their egg. The one with the weapon backed away too but never laid the weapon down to make the gesture.

Sudden realization hit 27. “That’s what they were showing us with the hands. They were saying we are not armed. They don’t have claws even, and they don’t have any other arms to carry weapons so it is an absolute statement. The one with the weapon of course didn’t do so, but he wasn’t stepping away from shelter and seeking a parley. Our neighbor made a big mistake.”

            No, she corrected herself thoughtfully, she made a whole series of mistakes.

Now that they were back at their egg, the small creatures seemed reluctant to go inside although they had the opening working again. The smaller one who had made the first gesture made another. It seemed harmless since the armed one stayed still.

“I’m not sure what it means mother, but just repeating their gestures  seems to be safe. May I respond this time?” 28 asked her mum.

“Go ahead.”

The young dragon one raised a single dainty open hand and waved. That seemed to satisfy the three and they filed back in the hole in the egg which closed.

“Whatever are we going to do with these strange new neighbors who are so dangerous mother?”

“We are going to patrol our land and go over and patrol our late neighbors land too, until you can hold it yourself” she said still staring at the distant egg. “And next season although you are too young I will swim in the river and hope for another quickened egg, and we will stop each time we pass this strange place on our road and make the gesture of peace and what I think is the respectful gesture of leave taking, and we will wait until your sister is as big as you and I can take turns patrolling your boundaries with both of you. Then when our legacy is safe in you and a generation sister I will walk over to these creatures’s berm and try to learn more about how to talk with them. Who knows? Perhaps they will try to talk to us again if our neighbor did not scare them away forever.”

“We know two gestures and I will speak of what I plan with you both so that if I fail you will not only pass the True Memory of what has worked from today but you can even learn from what has failed if the worst should happen. It seems to me now that all these old wise ones carrying such a treasure of memory are perhaps carrying a burden when they have to deal with a new thing and try to impose the narrowness of what they know on it. They remember everything that worked and was preserved in memory. I intend for us to learn the other half of life’s lessons – what doesn’t work. The Sisters of the Twelve have been throwing away half of life’s lessons because what kills you is never remembered.”

27 started walking along their road away from the alien egg and strange activities. She was still thoughtful and walked until the clearing was out of sight and groomed the trail yanking encroaching bushes from the edge with her huge rear talons as if it were any normal day, and not the day everything changed. 28 stayed silent sensing she was still not done with her answer.

“And if we succeed in communicating,” She finally added, “I intend to find out what sort of memories these strange small creatures carry that have such powerful weapons, and I don’t intend to share it with our esteemed  sisters of the Twelve Lines that hold us in such derision. No, I don’t even want to be accepted back as a crippled part of the Third Line anymore, and have to remember the shame of years we were outcasts. We will simply be the The New Line apart from the Twelve with no false pride in Generation numbers and no disdain for anything new. The Twelve can scramble to keep up with us if they want to share our new world.”

 

 

Prologue for new book

I would like to consider what would happen if humans meet a race with perfect memory – not just of their own life but a encyclopedic memory of their ancestor’s lives. That line of thought made me consider – How exactly would the aliens themselves adjust to the transition from what we consider normal memory to a racial eidetic memory? This story will consider that and then the next snippet will deal with first contact with humans. I’d very much appreciate comments on the whole idea and my implementation.

A New World

Prologue

She woke up slowly, aware of a pearly glow surrounding her and drifted off again. Her memories were cloudy. It was like a computer full of data but only a tiny fraction could be displayed on the screen at one time. She could remember smells but not what they identified. Single words but not build them into a sentence.  As her brain mass increased that fraction increased, but it was still such a struggle. She sometimes drifted back asleep before she could retrieve the full portion she wanted.

Her memories were getting vivid and more than she could sort, time was something she sensed while awake now, but she was not yet aware of the separate times she slept. Once when awake she had a sudden surprise as her world was suddenly shrouded in shadow and then physically shifted as she was tumbled over and repositioned in an unaccustomed move that left her dizzy. But it also gave her something new, a memory that was clearly different than the previous memories. This new event was walled off from the others in a second set she had no labels for yet. Another time she became somewhat more alert and became aware of her own snout projecting into her field of vision from between her lower eyes. She retained that memory in the new set also and expected to see it when she opened her eyes. It was a start to a sense of self.

There was something wrong though. Her greater store of memories had a similar picture of a snout, but it was courser and different. The pattern of stripes on it was not the same, and it had something her present one didn’t. It took another cycle of sleep before she could think of it and it was a sound to her –scar- yet it was too much to remember what it meant exactly or indeed what a word was exactly before the sleep took her again.

This time she dreamed and remembered what it felt like to walk and move limbs she had been strangely unaware of in a sort of paralysis. She remembered swimming in a warm river and laying quiet in the shallows as a few small males swam around afraid to come close but helpless to go away against the force her pheromones held over their tiny minds. Finally one grasped her tail and slowly pulled himself up it until he could release his milky cloud of life giving fluid. The released from his hormonal haze he fled in terror from this huge creature he found himself grasping. She remembered laughing at the expected antics.

Now that the thought of movement returned she felt suddenly confined and stretched to stand but came up against a confining wall. Her head was bent over and her tail curled up in front of her but she could get no leverage against this confining prison. Her tiny arms tucked under her chin were useless to even reach this alabaster barrier, but her heavier arms below had no such trouble. The only problem was the barrier did not yield even when she struck against it so hard a new and unpleasant sensation jolted up her arm from the abused hand. Her lower limbs didn’t feel all that different to move but when she gathered both of them and struck at the slippery surface the effect was much different. A huge section shattered in a star of shards all still stuck to the sticky membrane lining her prison. Another swipe tore this film away and the light that flooded in caused her to close her eyes at its brilliance. What was even more overwhelming was the flood of odors.

She stopped trying to get out not from exhaustion or caution, but in mental overload at the flood of memories too complex and important for her to process yet. One idea seemed imperative. A whole list of these new smells fit under the classification of people. The strongest of them even evoked a memory of a face, kindly and intelligent with handsome stripes that were bright with the high contrast of a calm and open personality. There was an identity that went with that face but it was a complex of history and ancestry that was more than her mind could hold yet. When she looked back at the opening it was filled with an enormous yellow eyeball. The sight made her try to run with instinctive fear at anything that big. Surely something that big could swallow her in one bite with no trouble, but she only succeeded in jamming her head into the narrow end of her prison and ripping the opening even bigger at the other end.

Something was wrong. None of this made sense to her. In her store of memories nothing living was as big as that huge eyeball indicated, nothing at all.

So her brain slowly reasoned it out, still sluggish for reasons she didn’t understand, if it can’t be that big, I must be – small. It didn’t make any sense. She had no memories of being small. She sorted through those memories awkwardly.

She did remember being smaller than someone. She suddenly realized it was her Egg-Mother. She remembered only coming up to her mother’s mid-arms, and remembered them holding her firmly while her delicate feeding arms groomed and stroked her.

A deep voice rumbled from outside. “Come little daughter. Don’t give up so easily. Your Egg-Mother will be back from the hunt soon and you’ll miss your share if you are too lazy to push your way into the world today.”

The words were still too complicated for her but she recognized the pattern of emotion in the words, concern and something that matched the face she remembered – amusement.

Gripped with a new determination she attacked the ragged edge of the opening remembering now how to use the claws on her sturdy lower limbs. The eggshell came apart until it lay in fragments around her. It was not the only one. It simply added to the litter filling the nest, and among the shards were three more eggs with curved unbroken sides. Even more startling were the two other chicks separated by those unhatched eggs, straining their necks toward the kindly face she had remembered. She was hunger too she realized. But overriding the hunger was confusion and disbelief. How could she be a chick? She couldn’t think of all the words for it, but chicks were dumb. A lot dumber than she was aware she was even though she was struggling to think.

While she struggled with these thoughts another big figure loomed over them covering a big chunk of the sky. She looked up and it was like looking in a still pond. The face above her was what she remembered in such detail right down to the scar on the muzzle. The feeling of dislocation was intense. That’s me! Was all her present thinking ability could formulate. And yet right away she saw it was not her. It was the me of a thousand memories, but not the me of the second set she was adding to minute by minute.

“This one of yours is odd,” the original person said to the one that had come up. “She focuses on you like she is a couple months old instead of just opening her mouth to be fed.” I hope she eats OK.”

When her Egg-Mother started shredding the game she carried and feeding the communal nest her friend’s fears were unjustified.  Her new daughter accepted the meat just as readily as her nest sisters, if not as noisily. If she didn’t know better she would have sworn the chick was trying to speak instead of just react to the feeding. That was silliness of course. A youngster didn’t start to form recognizable words until about four seasons. Every Egg-Mother thought her own child was prettier and smarter than its nest sisters. Since this was her first she especially didn’t want to give her more experienced nest partners reason to laugh at her, so she kept silent.

* * *

When the chicks started to stand and walk the difference was disturbing.  A few passes back and forth and the new chick walked with a grace and control that was disturbing.  At a half season the young ones’ heads were still over large and when they swung them about they tottered as it threw their balance off.  Watching the strange one, the eldest of the nest watchers was moved to exclaim, “Gods, this one will shame us all as a dancer when she has her growth!”

With the egg shells cleared away the nest sisters brought wood shavings and sweet grass to litter the nest while the new ones learned to control their bodies.  They were astonished when the precocious one climbed out of the nest and struggled with weak claws to dig a hole for her excrement. The ground there was far too hard packed by many feet, but the duty nurse lifted her further away and scooped a hole with her clawed lower arm. They watched silent as she did her business like a child with three or four seasons and trotted back to the nest.

The eldest of the watchers walked into the middle of the biggest patch of flat ground not occupied with others and did something they rarely saw. She raised her tail and struck the ground three blows. At her age she no longer moved easily and the blows must have hurt, but she didn’t hold back, striking with a force that would recall their sisters for a good kilometer in every direction. She stood there, very erect, keeping her own counsel while the crowd grew silent and expectant around her.

When enough time had passed for the most distant sister to have arrived at a moderate run she stepped up on the edge of the nest so she could see the furthest face regarding her.

“I am called Blue-dot, because I have a neck marking on my face,” she indicated the unusual feature with a delicate upper hand. “I have held on to life for twelve twelves and two seasons. Is there another who is elder to me to speak first?”

The crowd looked expectantly at a couple of the visibly older specimens present and all of them made that little quivering rocking motion with their head that was a no.

“Very well, I struck the ground, as is the ancient custom, because there is a danger to all.” That made a few, especially a few of the very young look about at the jungle and sky.

“The danger is not external, as we have heard our mother’s mother dealt with back before the egg eaters were exterminated, and when many of us lived where the earth itself threatened on occasion to send forth fire and dust. This is a danger it may be more difficult to wrap your mind around. Imagine if you would that we walked away and abandoned these chicks to hunger and cold to die.”

That made the crowd shudder and one youngster that was not even of breeding age herself to cry out – “Never!”

“That is not the way of people. We don’t leave our young alone like the animals who have no sisters to stand guard while we hunt for our daughters.”

“Indeed. And yet we also have perceptions the animals don’t. We don’t waste food and time on those that are born blind or with the deformed mouth that will never allow them to hunt. Those with the deformed foot or other defect we kill with sadness before they have grown to be more aware of their own passing.”

“If you are speaking of my egg,” Short-tail the mother of the strange one spoke, ” I have avoided saying anything because she is my first. I didn’t want to sound foolish by claiming she is different. Every mother thinks the sun only rose in the morning for her chick, and I wanted to display more wisdom than that.”

“But I must object nothing she has done is a defect. I have considered if she may be a threat to the others of her generation. She may move with more mastery than her peers, and she probably could harm them because she has use of her limbs and claws they can’t match. However I have watched carefully, and never seen her act aggressively. Not once has she nipped or swiped at her nest mates. I will not be silent or agree she is a danger to the others.”

Perhaps unconsciously her lower limbs were unfolded. She hadn’t spread her claws in display, but her posture suggested she’d take them all on before she’d let them harm her chick.

“I agree,” the eldest sister hurried to assure her. “Your chick is very much different, but not at all defective. Our old custom addresses defects, but here we have something new and strange we don’t have a custom to deal with. What do we do when a chick is superior? When it has obvious advantages over the others? I fear we may fail to appreciate the opportunity sisters.” A look around showed they were listening but were still not sure what point she was trying to make.

“Ah, you don’t see it yet,” she told them. “Perhaps my years do give me an insight I can’t easily share.”

“Sister Bright -X,” she called to one of the older ones like her, “What will happen when Short-tail takes her hatchling back to her estate for the change of season?”

“At the rate she is going the youngster will be ready to mark her own territory as soon as she is physically big enough to hunt the smaller game. Maybe her fifth or sixth season.”

“Yes, you’ve seen it too. And that means Short-tail will be back in the river and forming another egg before the rest of you who laid this season return. Why some of you may raise your daughters for a full fourteen seasons before pushing them out. Short-tail’s chick may be back here to breed before you are again!”

“In a hundred generations…” One voice said in awe.

“Exactly. In a hundred generations, if she or her chick breed true to this type… Her line will own the valley all the way to the mountains. Their chicks will own the interior of the continent and be pressing back the sisters who colonized the shore of the far sea at the same time we did this side.”

“It’s not just early development,” one of the elders said. “If she is as competent about hunting and management, and taking the lead among her people as she is walking and speech, she will dominate.”

“So,” Blue-dot asked, looking around. “Do you want our culture and our branch of the people to dominate the new continent? In honesty in a thousand generations it will probably mean they will own the world.”

“You are asking if we will allow the daughters of our bodies to be supplanted,” one sister noted in horror.

“Yes, but our essence will be incorporated in them,” Blue-dot pointed out.

“How so, when nobody can compete with them?”

“Because for a long time they will only find our males in the streams with which to mate.”

They all stood silent absorbing the idea. Nobody gave any thought to any inheritance through the males. They were simply turned out into the wild to survive or not according to their abilities. Their smaller, darker eggs were buried in the hot river banks and not even tended.

It’s true, every so often you’d see a prominent marking, or a dominant odor and you could guess from what line a male had carried features over to a new female. But the emotional tie was to the mother. All the language and tradition came from the female side.

“I was afraid if I did not speak, someone would piece this all together in their mind, and feel threatened,” Blue-dot explained. “All it would take is one quick snap of the jaws, and such a thing might be reasonable in the person’s mind who did it. I for one would not judge after the fact. But I’m asking you all to consider it now and decide what is right before acting. I think we should protect this chick as the savior of our heritage.”

“You are asking us to decide to pass our philosophy and song and language as more important than the bond of our bodies,” one summed up.

“Is that not why we crossed the sea?” Blue-dot asked. “Did not the rigid society of our old land offend us? Which is more important really? Do you want to go back to having our estates measured off for us instead grasping all we can mark off?”

One of the elders who spoke before, Bright-X spoke again. “Maybe. You are assuming her daughters will breed true but not her sons. Who knows if either or both will breed this quality? We need to find out and act accordingly. You know my mother breed to a male from Red-X or I wouldn’t have this face,” she declared rubbing her prominent cross stripes. “I suggest we do a new thing and tend a nest for her male egg. When it hatches we should mark the hatchling so that we will know if we breed with it in the future. They mature their second season. We’ll know what we are dealing with in short order. If her males breed true then we can all have superior daughters of our body. If not we may have to ask her to yield her male eggs so something of our bloodline remains in the population.” Bright-X  shifted posture to show she was done speaking.

“Let us leave the matter for more seasons as needed. Is there anyone unwilling to wait and see how Short-tail’s males breed before taking any action? Do you all agree to protect her chick the same as the others?” Blue-dot slowly scanned the crowd so none could say later they had no say. “Very well. We shall attend the matter when she has produced a male and we have seen it breed,” and she stepped down tired from the unaccustomed stress.

* * *

            The male was conflicted with hormones and fright. The sister suppressed a laugh, scared it would chase this skittish male away. He was a little one, two seasons old, swimming hard just to deal with the current, and on his snout was a scar drawn cross hashed to be obviously artificial. Males did stick their noses in the damnedest places and not a few had natural scars. But this one was marked as belonging to Short-tail. His tail was just fine whipping against the flow. She had gotten her name because her tail had been nipped short by a nestling sister, not any defect. Big-nose stayed still letting him perform his instinctive function and hoped her egg would prove out the theory they all hoped for – that they could each have such precocious daughters of their body. It was no accident she found him. She had laid in the shallows all morning and chased away a dozen other males after examining their snouts closely. This was an entirely new thing among her people to select a mate.

If there are several such select males each should have their own scar mark to differentiate them she mused. What would be other shapes that would not be confused with natural wounds? When her sisters came up to see what she was doing she had drawn an X ,a V and An O in the sand. It didn’t take them long to suggest  D and Z.

* * *

            Bright-Star was five seasons old when her vocal apparatus matured enough to form all the sounds of her elder’s speech.  Before then the baby talk of her species was not a cultural affection but a physical limitation. Other than toilet training and swimming little was taught until then. It was no accident that yes, no, and thank-you of mature talk could be formed by juvenile throats. Patience had its limits.

The fact that this young one could accurately describe what had happened on occasions well before her hatching disturbed them. They already knew she was precocious  The idea she actually remembered the things she claimed was so unlikely it took a long time and many repetitions of detailed memory before they accepted it. Once they did it became a mark of deep respect to be asked to instruct her in the hunt or the making of braid work or weapons. The healers took her into the woods and showed her the best herbs and mushrooms. The fisher folk showed her the secrets of driving the water dwellers into a pen, and the fire makers shared the secret of making new fire to drive the herds before it.

Now what they were all holding their breath waiting to see was if it bred true in her or from the same line’s males. If it did they could see the world was theirs.  They gathered the three fiercest of fighters and appointed them to guard her night and day.

When the trait was passed on from males there was a collective sigh of relief. This presented much less opportunity for conflict, at least within their own clan. As for the old society across the ocean, there was much discussion of what it would take to work as a group and remove them from their territory. Most were in favor of consolidating their hold on the new continent – first.

END

Shorts – Get no respect

It’s hard to make money with short stories. The effort to sell them is more than to write them. And bad writing seems to show up more clearly when you can’t hide it in a nice fat book. I’m going to assemble my shorts – perhaps even add a couple new ones – and market them as a collection. One of the stories will be this:

Improvement

By: Mackey Chandler

 

The number of stars gathered around the monitor was impressive. They were all general officers and Captain Joe Buckley was tense with so much high powered brass looking over his shoulder. So far he’d been able to answer all their questions in a manner that kept his own boss lurking in the background smiling.

“So this software has two solid intercepts to it’s credit?” General Hyatt asked.

“Yes sir, we had two real world intercepts at White Sands with both the advanced Patriot system configured for ballistic intercept and also the third generation Arrow developed with the Israelis. We have it running the fourth generation Arrow right now. The software remains unchanged but the Arrow hardware is slightly improved. Those changes in the Arrow have all been validated by the Israelis including four actual launches and intercepts.”

“So, show us on the screen the limits of what you are actually protecting right now,” General Polzinsky requested. Joe tapped a few keys and a dashed line defined a parabolic arch that cut around Baltimore to the north, well out over the Atlantic, and back in across the coast enclosing most of the East shore of the Chesapeake. There was a shaded area outside that line with diminishing probability of an intercept from Pittsburgh down to almost  North Carolina.

Major Leo Champion stepped back in to control the presentation. “If there is an intercontinental launch we expect the national system to deal with that. The big advantage of this system is it can deal with submarine launches the national system is not designed to catch. The time to impact on a sub launched missile can be as little as twenty seconds if they have the guts to get in really close.”

The screen flashed solid red three times rapidly in time with a buzzer. A box appeared out over the Atlantic beside an X and text in it said, Bandits (4) +37.5154N/-73.9292W – 12/04/09 – 1407:23 – Impact (2) +38.8100N/-76.8672W – 83 sec. Impact (2) +38.8946N/-77.0094W –88sec.

“I didn’t know you were going to run any exercises for us today.”

“We’re not, that’s a real launch,” Joe told him in a strangely calm voice. “Just beyond the continental shelf. You were right sir, They didn’t have the balls to ride right up the Potomac.”

“Aren’t you going to do something?” asked General Hyatt asked.

“It’s all automatic at this point. No human is fast enough to run it. D.C, and Andrews are targeted,” he mentioned conversationally.

The box on the screen had been joined by two circles over the Chesapeake that said MIRV separation confirmed – interceptors hot. The impact count was in the last thirty seconds.

The screen turned blue and text appeared. “The configuration of your hardware has changed three times since installation. Windows Genuine Advantage requires you to confirm the authenticity of your copy of Windows. To avoid running in limited mode you must call your Microsoft customer service representative and get a new validation number. Attempting to reboot will result in limited functionality until you call your customer service center. This is for your protection.”

Of course none of them had time to read the entire message.

“Family Law” is published on Amazon/Kindle

My second book is available on Amazon Kindle. I’ll get it up on Nook soon.  I decided to get it up with a plain cover rather than delay and work on a fancy one. I can add a better one later.  Amazon/Kindle link.  Uploaded to Nook on 12/03/2011. Takes a few hours to post.

Book Cover Attempt

This is my first effort at trying any ‘painting’ program. Gimp in this case. I will read the instructions and try again. He is supposed to have a middle arm in the pic but it looks like a hip…The whole thing needs brightened a bit but not too much. I want a sinister lurking quality.

Second pic is closer to what I want but details now really look crude. Have a ways to go.

 

“Family Law” #3

Chapter 3

            Derfhome didn’t look that much different from orbit than Earth. Different shapes to the land, a little bit less water, but blue and green and brown with white swirls much the same. Lee was old enough now to appreciate the complexities of approaching a civilized world. She’s been eight when they had been to Grandhome as their last planet fall. She’d sat at a dead console then reading a book quite bored with the adults droning on about stuff on the com.

This time she sat at a live board side by side with Gordon and listened to all the traffic control commands and clearances he had to deal with. He muted his mic frequently and explained as much as he could as if she might have to do it herself some day. Traffic control was still in English just like Earth, and had been going clear back to pre-space aircraft, but Lee could tell not all the Derf were as fluent or unaccented as Gordon.

Their ship, High Hopes, had a four seat command deck and was technically a ten person ship, ten humans that is. Gordon used a lot more life support, equal to about three humans, and one of the reasons they bought a Falcon IV was it was designed after the discovery of Derfhome and had Derf capable corridors and hatches. In seventy years Derf not only crewed, but now there were Derf who owned ships. When Derf had first gone on human ships they were often stuck in a hold with access to most of the ship impossible.

A Derf cabin was made in a Falcon by the expedient of removing a partition between two human cabins. Since they had room to spare Gordon had taken the volume of three human cabins and the Andersons had made theirs a double. Exploration ships never had enough room for supplies or specimens and materials coming back so the other rooms weren’t wasted. One was an armory, and one an autosurgery. Both made double so Gordon could use them too. Only Lee had a single, and her mom had been worried that was too small now.

Rather than take their own shuttle down to Derfhome it was much cheaper to dock at an orbital and take a commercial shuttle down. That avoided all kinds of complications and delay decontaminating their shuttle because it had been in a new biosphere. Sealing it off made it much simpler and infinitely cheaper. Fuel, water, and other consumables could be supplied without breaching quarantine. Only they had to be decontaminated.

They left all their personal items on board, except what was on their back and Gordon’s carry case with ID and his bank cards.

The first thing they had to do coming from a new live world was submit to a medical evaluation and a very thorough clean up which included special showers and hard vacuum cleaning of what they carried before they were free to enter public spaces.

The Anderson’s remains would be taken from their hold where Gordon had laid them by the lock, easy to remove, and handled like biohazard for autopsy and cremation. Gordon didn’t intend to talk to Lee about that unless she asked. No point at all in stirring up every horrible memory when she was doing so well.

Any well populated world had such procedures, but exploration ships often had to stop at the first port they could make. A newer colony world would probably just service their ship and turn them away if they couldn’t evaluate them, maybe even put medical staff aboard if needed and send them along.

Their log was examined for any fevers or medical problems, and they had swabs and blood samples drawn. If they hadn’t been in flight for near a month they’d have been required to sit out a ten day incubation period before entering the habitat, much less the world below. They exited their ship directly into a medical suite.

The doctor who entered stood back and asked in English if Lee was comfortable being examined by her, or if she wanted to wait until her parent was done with his examination and could be present? The doctor was a female Derf with lighter fur, noticeably smaller than Gordon.

“I’m sure if you have been assigned this task you are wholly qualified and I would never be so rude as to question your ability when I have no medical training.” The fact that she said it in perfect Derf, and made the gesture of respect crossing her true (and only) hands palm in seemed to surprise the nice lady.

“Well, I see it’ll be easy enough talking with you. Some human children are scared of Derf if they haven’t been around them. We are after all big and look a lot different. How do you come to speak Derf so well?”

“From my uncle Gordon who’s going to be my step dad now,” Lee said in English. She didn’t know how you could say that in Derf.

“I don’t understand that phrase,” the doc admitted.

“Is he in another room close?”

The lady looked at the computer she carried and touched a couple places.

“Yes, he’s two doors down the hall.”

“Why don’t you go peek in at him and everything will be clear.”

When she came back she was chuckling with a grin like a Great White and wasn’t worried Lee would take it wrong. Neither did she hang back to avoid scaring her.

“Whatever ‘step’ means that Derf is one fine looking hunk in case you didn’t know it. You put in a good word for doctor Shaborbroh if you get a chance.”

“He’s rich too,” Lee told her, and got another genuine laugh. She wandered if the doctor was what Derf considered good looking too? She’d have to ask Gordon how to tell. Maybe have him point out examples. She’d been away from people so long growing up she wasn’t sure she even knew what was good looking or ugly for her own species. Sometimes the examples they put forth in movies and vid didn’t make sense to her. Everything she’d read made it clear it was  important to a lot of people. All of a sudden she realized she didn’t know if she was pretty or plain. Unc’ was right. This dealing with groups was going to be complicated.

When she was done Lee was probably cleaner than she’d ever been before, still slightly damp and terribly hungry because her entire digestive tract had been flushed out and examined. She smelled of antiseptic and even her ears had been swabbed for cultures and peered in and carefully cleaned. They’d decided she could keep her hair. She could have put up with losing it, but she wondered how Uncle Gordon would like being shaved?

The doctor returned and gave her two packets, one to be added to her next meal and the other a tube of gel to be rubbed all over her skin.

“You can start on the gel now if you want. You’ve had the bacteria stripped from you so thoroughly you need to restore the beneficial varieties and these are cultures of them.”

Her clothing was not processed yet so she was waiting for them, sitting on the Derf idea of a blanket, on a Derf examination table about the size of a billiard table. The top was almost to her arm pit level off the floor and she’d had to jump and throw a leg over the edge to make it up there when she first came in. She started at her toes and rubbed little dabs of the gel all over. It seemed to be oil based instead of water so it wasn’t cold.

It helped that Derf kept the temperature at a very comfortable level for a human in skin instead of freezing their patients in paper gowns like human doctors. It was quite different than the dimly remembered one time in her life she’d seen a human doctor. That had been when she was six years old and she’d had a physical and inoculations the first time they returned to civilization after her birth.

* * *

            Humans were common enough on the orbital station that there were plenty of restaurants with human scale chairs and silverware. The guide book said the port below was the same too. Out in the countryside though humans had best have their own silverware and pillows, clothing and medicines, or do without. It suggested a folding step stool was a handy thing too.

When released they went straight to a restaurant. It was between usual meal times so it wasn’t crowded. Lee ordered like she’d never eat again. Most of the Derf items on the menu were things she’d tried because Gordon had them along on the ship. She was offered a human menu and ordered off it and off the Derf menu too. A double cheeseburger with sweet onion relish didn’t surprise the waiter, but a bowl of devil horn soup from the Derf sheet did. It was mixing bowl size and full of an egg drop broth with little black peppers that rivaled habañeros for heat.

There were tables with Derf and tables with Humans. There were even a few tables with a mix. But there were no other children of either species in the restaurant and everybody was trying hard not to stare at the pair of them. They might as well have gone ahead and satisfied their curiosity for all the success they were having.

While they waited they plotted. “While we’re here you should see a few of the sights. You never really know when you’ll get back. It’s been fifteen years for me, and that wasn’t something I planned.”

“Does your family know we’re coming?”

“I dropped them mail, said we’d be around. Things don’t change very quickly in a Derf holding. I expect things will look much the same as when I left. We’ll spend a week at least. Anything less would suggest we didn’t really want to be there. Derf do things slower than humans. Some of that is probably because we live longer. You knew that didn’t you?”

“Yes I know that Derf live over two hundred T-years. But I have no idea how old you are, Unc’.”

“I’m coming up on seventy, sneaking up on middle age for a Derf. Not old enough they will try to get me to settle down back at home, but old enough to get a little respect from the youngsters that remember me from my last visit. There are some other places we should see while we’re here. We should see the Richards’ monument and graveyard.”

“Who’s he and when did he die?”

“Oh, nobody knows what happened to Richards. It’s his monument, but the graveyard part is for some of his crewmates who died here. That’s who is in the cemetery. He jumped out of Fargone twenty years or so ago on an explorer like us, and the ship was never seen again. He was the commander on the ship that discovered Derf, discovered for humans that is, since we’ve been here all along of course. You haven’t read the story?”

“No, I know it was about seventy years ago. I haven’t read much modern history. Dad has been having me study lots of old stuff, pre-space stuff.” Lee got her soup then so Gordon told her the story while she ate.

“Our first contact we had with outsiders – humans – was with a big company ship. They located a group of Derf out on a hunt. It was as if an alien race surveyed a modern Earth and decided to contact a family of Mongol herders instead of setting down in Moscow. It might have seemed safer to them but it was a slow way to initiate contact.”

“The group was seasonal hunters and trappers, and they appeared to have a pretty low level of tech to the humans because they used mostly bronze for their axes and arrow points. They were clansmen sent to hunt in the fall and then returned to their keep to winter over. Not what humans think of as true nomads.”

“There were no radio emissions so they assumed Derf had no electronics. Truth was even then most clan seats were connected by shielded telephone lines, but radio was slow to be adapted because our star interferes with it so much. Derf made good steel too, but it was expensive and limited in use to such things as better knives and surgical instruments. In fairness some of it was the fact we have some really exceptional bronze alloys that substitute well for steel. We even had firearms, although they were very expensive and rare.”

“Derf can pull a stiff bow and we’re the biggest thing in the woods so we don’t need guns for protection. We killed off the few predators who could challenge us in our prehistory. And it’s been about twelve hundred years since we had a clan war, so there isn’t any big market for military weapons.”

“The humans sent a shuttle down, spread blankets and put out some trade goods near the clansmen. The Derf came in cautiously. That was just smart if you consider they had never seen anything before that was clearly a flying artifact. We have no history of UFO sightings in popular culture like you people. After three days of feeling each other out most of both sides felt safe to visit.

They traded a few words and were starting to trade a few trinkets. They were getting a feel for relative value. Some things there was no interest and they would be withdrawn by the side that offered them. The Humans ran a camera on the shuttle recording it all and the Derf sent a junior member of their party as a runner to inform their clan.

“On the third day one of the shuttle crew made a mistake. One felt intimidated and took a step back and put her hand on her gun. They might have been country folk, but the Derf weren’t stupid. They knew what weapons were just by how they were carried, and they knew what firearms were even if they didn’t have such a luxury.

The Derf was a female like the crew-person and pointed at the hand on pistol and used one of the few words they knew. She said quite clearly on the video – ‘No.’ Second mistake the Earthies made was another of the crew misreading the confrontation between the crew woman and Derf grabbed his weapon too. But he made the fatal error of trying to draw it. Derf custom is crystal clear; if you draw a weapon it’s assumed you intend to use it.”

“The poor fellow had a bronze ax in his breast bone before he even fully cleared leather. Once it goes bad like that with everybody drawing weapons there’s no recovering and it was over in three seconds. Final score was Derf: 7, Humans: 0, bronze against modern weapons.”

“Ouch.”

“Indeed. Here my people are, with a bunch of dead aliens on their hands, and they didn’t know what to do with them. I mean they were obviously people, so they couldn’t just let them lay exposed, but they didn’t know if they buried their dead or cremated them or what. They didn’t know if any more they met would be hostile or not, and didn’t want to further antagonize them.

“So the Derf did what they’d do for their own. They cut wood and built great stacked funeral pyres and laid the bodies on top in as good an order as they could. All this was in front of the camera on the shuttle although they didn’t know that it was watching them. But they didn’t light the pyres; they left one male to guard them against scavengers and withdrew.”

“Now because the humans had a big ship they had a second shuttle. They could have been stupid and wiped the Derf party out from the air. Or they could have tried a new contact somewhere else thinking word would not get out since they didn’t know we had phones.”

“Fortunately for everybody the commander Richards had a brain just like our male who made the funeral pyres, and he watched the video off the grounded shuttle several times. The Derf treated his dead with respect, and stole nothing of the trade goods laid out. He related later that made him decide to land a crew to recover the first shuttle and he went down too.”

“He did something that was quite brave. He tossed his gun belt in the airlock and walked down to meet the Derf unarmed. The male there reciprocated by lodging his ax in a tree before walking up to Richards. Not that he needed it given his mass and claws, but it was a nice gesture. Once they were talking again the Derf called in his eldest female of the hunters to be principal voice. They made especially sure the humans understood Derf custom about drawing a weapon.”

“The basic agreement they held out for was that Derf be treated exactly equal to Humans. Now remember, this is a work party they contacted at random. Not some clan elders who are used to negotiating with their peers. And hunters, not some city folk or traders who are used to negotiating business deals. So they did a hell of a job of representing for our whole race with the first aliens we’d ever seen.”

“Commander Richards agreed to equality eventually, although it took some days. I’m sure, now that I know humans well, that he knew it would not go over well at home. Final version was – Humans would follow Derf law on Derfhome, and Derf would follow Human law on Earth. They also established right there at the start that Humans and Derf could buy and sell land as individuals, but there would be no extraterritoriality. Derf would not be forced onto reservations or concede tracts of land to Humans.”

“When word got back to Earth a lot of people were unhappy with Commander Richards. But it was within his authority to negotiate and it was affirmed by a Congress who accepted his word that his people were in error, and worried about creating enemies. It’s certainly better than the treaties anyone else has gotten from Man. As far as we’re concerned he was a great statesman. It wasn’t Humans that put up a monument to him, it was we Derf.”

“I’d like to see that,” Lee agreed. “Did they honor your people on the monument too?”

“That’s not our way of doing things. It would be an embarrassment to anyone still alive. That was only seventy years ago. Maybe later after they have died we might add them. This was so soon after I was born I was too young to remember it, but they still count me in the generation born before contact. And you know, I bet maybe one in ten thousand humans have ever actually seen a Derf still. There’s just too damn many of you.”

“But almost everybody has seen pictures,” Lee pointed out. “Not that they do you justice.” She decided to share what the doctor told her about his being a ‘hunk’. Just then his food came and no matter how she prodded him he wouldn’t discuss it. Pretending to have his mouth full and ignoring that topic. She gave up and worked on an apple-caramel confection with vanilla ice cream, until one more bite and she’d need to be carried away.

“Oh my, that’s so much better than ration packs,” Lee told him.

“Your days of eating ration packs are over,” Gordon said laughing. “Just don’t expect everything to be this fancy in the back country when you meet my family. This is a five star restaurant. Just having a live waiter tells you it’s Ritzy. There might be half a dozen places in the system that can cook like this, and three of them are probably on station. My family cooks simple, peasant style, humans would say. But it’s fresh and in season even if it isn’t all fancy sauces and garnishes.”

“Can we afford this?” Lee asked, really looking around for the first time.

“We have enough cash to live very well for some months, and once we reveal some of our claim we’ll have a letter of credit before we go to Earth that will let you buy  this place on a whim.

“It must be very hard not to get fat when you’re rich. I ate so much if there’s a low G hotel on this hab I’d take that over full gravity.”

“I already got us rooms at the Lunar Suites. It’s about seventy percent G, but the restaurant is about ten percent over because that’s Derf standard. In a half hour you’ll be complaining you’re hungry anyway.”

It was a nasty lie. It took over an hour.

* * *

            Lee woke up in the dark and strained to see something. There was a pale blue glow of a night light shining out of the bathroom door. A couple sparks of color glowed here and there where LEDs marked the location of electronics in the dark. The hotel smelled different than their ship, and despite sound deadening faint strange noises and thumps bothered her sleep.

Gordon was curled up backed into the corner of the room and she was in his arms where she’d been sleeping every night for the last month. She felt safe there, and neither of them could see any reason she should be all alone in a cold bed. In fact they had taken a Derf room that didn’t have a human bed, just a padded sleeping mat.

The Power of Science Fiction

Everything we have today such as cell phones, satellite communications, robotic surgery, lasers, personal computer, digital cameras, all sprang from the imagination of dreamers.

Somebody dreamed like this:

 

 

 

And then somebody did the engineering and bent some metal and had the nerve to climb in the damn thing. And we have this:

The Charm of Country Stores

Above all they are practical. No fancy marketing. They have a sense of humor about themselves and often a resident cat. They may be good or bad but they are usually the only choice for many miles around. They often have a little restaurant with two mismatched tables and no two chairs alike. The donuts and such are probably made there and the owner immediately knows you are not a local.

The menu chalkboard may hang on a chain with two sides and gets flipped to the ‘tourist price’ side when they see a strange car park out front.

They may sell shoes, over the counter medicines, tire repair kits, reading glasses and ammunition all off the same shelf.

My rule of thumb is stay and do business if the place smells good.

“Family Law” Snippet – # 2

Chapter 2

            He woke in the early dawn, the perimeter lights still blazing but the sky behind them a bright salmon instead of black. Sticking up between his true arms was a little head with her nose buried in his arm pit. Her arms were curled in front of her with her hands crossed and palms on her shoulders. Her legs were tucked up to and his second set of arms crossed so that they went behind her tucking her in close.

“Umm, somebody left me a little snack in the night,” he rumbled in her ear and thrust a wet nose into the sensitive skin behind it.

“Ahhh, ahh, cold nose!!!” she protested, twisting to get away. That just got her another nose attack right between the shoulder blades. She kept turning until she went full circle looking him in the face and then her expression changed as she remembered last night and what happened.

“Oh Unc’,” she wailed and cried and cried until she finally gave herself the hiccups.

“What are we going to do?” she asked when she ran down.

“What people always do,” he explained softly, gently grooming her hair behind her ears. “We feel sad but get on with all the things we have to do to live. It’s harder for awhile. We never entirely forget, but it does get easier not to be sad after some time.”

“We weren’t done,” she protested.

“I know.” he agreed, understanding exactly what she meant.

* * *

            From the air everything for kilometers around looked like it had in the days before the attack. The huge eyes on the creatures gave him hope they didn’t hunt in the daylight. He circled around and landed with the tent off the car’s back quarter where Lee couldn’t see. There were no big scavengers yet, just a few rat analogs that scurried away as soon as he opened the door.

Jack and Myrtle went in specimen bags as well as the monster whose neck he’d broken. He’d have saved one of each sex, but he didn’t see any obvious gender signs. The air car had external chill lockers for such cargo so Lee was spared riding with body bags in the cabin.

That task taken care of he allowed Lee out to salvage anything important to her while he watched. She found her computer, the metal detector she’d been using, a couple spare magazines for her pistol that was down to six rounds, and her jacket. He recovered his sample case, the weapons, and his friend’s personal computers.

He recovered some ration packs, but most of the equipment like the lights he just abandoned as irrelevant and not worth the risk of exposing himself to injury recovering them with no backup adults to get them off planet. He’d never need them again, and the capitol they represented, so dear when they were bought, was nothing against the claim they had now. The bulk of their supplies were still in the air car anyway. This was just one of several camps they’d have made on this continent before returning to the shuttle. That plan was done.

“I didn’t get to tell mom, look what I found down by the stream Unc’.” She pulled a couple beautiful gold nuggets out of her jacket pocket and showed him. They were big ones, the largest easily a hundred grams.

“I’m glad you showed me that before we left,” Gordon told her. He made sure his computer was streaming to the expedition log and spoke.

“Note to our log – Claim number one for Lee Anderson, the valley of our third camp on Providence, claim marker 37-14-1239, with all adjoining peaks and a hundred kilometers beyond the drainage divide defined by those peaks. In particular all mineral rights, timber rights, as well as surface rights and riparian rights clear to the ocean to which the river drains. A patent to Lee Anderson and her heirs in perpetuity whether residents or not.”

“I’ve never had a claim of my own before,” Lee said with big eyes.

“High time you did then. Not that we found all that much before worth claiming, but your folks mentioned it for this world. You know you’ll hold all the claims your mom and dad had, as well as two of the three general shares for the whole discovery?”

“I’m rich then aren’t I?” she asked. It seemed a novel idea.

“So am I honey. We’re both so stinking rich it’s hard to understand. This is a world a ship with a crew of fifty or sixty would be delighted to find for a corporation and still count themselves rich off just their bonuses. If you think of anything else you want to claim before we leave speak up. Your folks and I claimed pretty close to the limits for individuals, but this valley is only about a quarter of what you could claim. That’s just something nice to have. The real money is in the finder’s percentage, and we only split it three ways,” He caught himself and frowned. “Two now,” he corrected softly.

Lee looked at the vast vista, the bowl of the valley filling their vision bounded by snow capped mountains on both sides. It stretched away from them growing wider so far away that the bordering mountains marched over the horizon on their way to the distant sea. Gordon didn’t say anything, letting her come to grips with having such a vast possession.

“Can I make a rule about how my land is used?” she finally said.

“Sure, that’s why I was so specific in making the claim for you.”

“Okay, I’d like to make it a rule nobody can ever build a house or anything for ten kilometers around where our camp was. They can put up a plaque or a statue or something to show where mom and dad died, but that’s it. It should be like a park and nobody can sell it off.”

“It’s on the log Lee. It’s like law now.”

“Good.”

After they were in the air and headed back to the shuttle Lee asked him, “Do you think those dinos could swim?”

“I really doubt it. Their tail is too thin and round, the feet have no webbing. Their tiny forelegs are probably not sufficient to keep the head above water, and they are very dense bone and muscle. Maybe if they were smart enough to hold on to a piece of wood like a life jacket, but I have my doubts they are that intelligent.”

“Then I’d like to claim a nice island somewhere. Far enough from the continents there shouldn’t be any of those lizards there.”

“We’ll look on our survey and pick a couple out. If those critters give settlers much trouble a couple nice islands might be choice real estate. But my guess is after ten or twenty years they will be asking if they should set a preserve aside to keep them from going extinct. That’s what happens with predators big enough to threaten man or his livestock.”

* * *

            Gordon set course for Derfhome without consulting Lee. If her parents had been alive they would have set out straight for Earth automatically. They needed to file claims for their planet, and Derf had no such registry, only Earth. It wasn’t critical to hurry, because they left a claim satellite in orbit. That and their records gave them five years to make their claims.

Claim jumping was not something he feared. It had been firmly eliminated a long time ago. The huge exploration companies saw to that because they didn’t want to expend half their energies and treasure fighting over keeping what they found. Their huge find would rattle people, but not enough to bring the system down. There had been two big finds by independents before with no problem. Indeed the big exploration companies found occasional news of such a find produced a flood of quality applicants.

Lee had been studying all morning. Gordon was pleased she’d taken up the routine of her lessons without his prompting. For a few of the things her mom and dad had tutored she was on her own for now. He could neither spar with her nor teach guitar. Otherwise the ships library had all the lesson materials anyone could wish.

Gordon had always been one of her tutors too. It had been the natural thing to ask his help when he was the closest adult. Besides Derf Gordon had taught her German and was currently learning Japanese with her using an interactive program on the computer. He was also an accomplished artist in water colors and colored pencil and shared that with her. Sometimes now though the lesson was interrupted when something made Lee think of her mom or dad and she needed to be held not tutored.

Gordon waited to talk to her until after they were in a shipboard routine and he felt sure Lee was stable emotionally. She was still mourning, he was too, but she was sleeping Okay, and she was not in denial. She didn’t avoid speaking of her mom and dad or pretend they were still alive. The crying was tapering off after a couple weeks. After lunch he took the opportunity.

“Lee, there’s something we need to talk about.”

“Every time Mom said that to me it was something bad.”

“It’s serious. But it doesn’t have to be bad. I need to know what you want to do now with the choices we can give you. You know we’re both going to be rich. That makes things easier, because we can both afford to do almost anything we want. We have to decide what you want to do and where you want to live for the next seven years until you are an adult. You aren’t used to living with other people, but you are going to have to learn how to get along with crowds of folks who aren’t family. It might not be as easy as you think.”

“Anywhere you want to live is fine with me,” Lee agreed with an indifferent shrug. “You’d know better than me where it’s nice. We could go around and look at different places. All I know is the High Hopes, and I’ve only seen a regular house on video. I’ve lived in a hotel for a couple weeks between trips. I know most people have a permanent place they stay like in the videos.” Gordon said nothing and let her rattle on.

Lee stopped and looked funny at Gordon. “Or are you saying you don’t want me to live with you anymore?” Her voice caught on a ragged edge, and she looked scared worse than when she’d come out of the sleeping bag.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. In fact that’s the first thing I want to offer and get out of the way. I’d like to adopt you as your guardian if you’re willing.

“Well of course,” she got up and came around the table pushing his true arms open to step in. “Hold me Uncle Gordon. You shouldn’t scare me like that. You’re the only family I’ve got and I never had any other idea but that I’d be with you. Nobody else knows me, and I love you.”

“And I love you too,” he said, gently scratching with four inch claws right between her shoulder blades where she liked, “but other people might have a hard time with us being a family. I can almost guarantee you no other little human girl is living with Derf as family, much less adopted.”

“Oh, come on. With all the billions of people, and all the way things can happen? Dad always said if something can happen it will eventually.”

“Eventually,” he allowed. “And somebody has to be first. You have no idea how rare it is for a child to grow up on a space ship. In fact your mom and dad always were nervous those times between trips when we lived in a hotel. They were always worried some busybody would object that was no way to raise a child and ask the court to take you away so you’d have a normal life. Somehow, I think they may have an even harder time with the idea of me being your surrogate daddy. A lot of people will see me as your parent’s business partner and no familial relation at all.”

“Well, I’ll tell them different. It would be just wrong to pull us apart.”

“Thank you. You may have to tell them. I want to stop at Derfhome first before we go to Earth. I set course already before talking to you so we have to stop there now no matter what we do. If you will be my daughter I intend to adopt you there on Derfhome first, and that makes it harder for anyone to argue at Earth. So you have a couple weeks to get used to the idea and talk about it. If you have any conditions, well, Derf law is a lot more flexible than Earth law. Derf can form just about any contract they wish and it’s nobody else’s business.”

“How can you ask conditions to be family?”

“Humans do it all the time when they marry. They write up a prenuptial agreement that says how and where they will live or how much of a household budget one will have if they don’t have their own money. It may be a second or third marriage and one partner wants his wealth set aside for their own children separate from any heirs the other has. That might be a good idea for you. If you are my daughter I’d be your heir if something happened to you. If you leave the money to somebody else it would remove any thought I was adopting you for your money. It’s not like I don’t have plenty of my own.”

Lee made a face to show what she thought of that.

“We might agree to spend a certain amount of time on Earth or another human world so you get used to dealing with other humans.”

“There are humans on Derfhome, right?”

“Yes, but it’s not a human society. Dealing with a society is a lot different than dealing with individuals. You have laws and bureaucracy, and customs that are more rigid that either, truth be known. You’ll see.”

About my first sale

I have been reading science fiction since I was in the 5th grade in elementary school. I didn’t get the bug to try writing it myself until I retired. Part of that was that I did poorly in school in my English classes. My spelling is not very good and my grammar tends to fall back into the Pennsylvania Dutch expressions my family used. I never was able to diagram sentences to the satisfaction of my teachers who loved to create complicated sentences that would illustrate some obscure point of grammar. It all seemed stupid and pointless to me.

I had already started on my first book when I read about Baen Publishing starting an e-zine and soliciting stories. I had never in my life tried to write a short story, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I wrote “Common Ground” and posted it to the Slush for the magazine on Baen’s website. It got a lot of comments and I made some changes to it. But a couple posters were very kind about it, one saying it was a “wonderful” story. Perhaps that reader feedback helped me, it certainly couldn’t have hurt.

I got a letter from Eric Flint the Editor that gave a great deal of advice. He pointed out all the perils of using dialect as I had in the beginning of the story, especially dialect of such a complex language as Russian. He freely admitted he avoided it himself because it was so difficult. I got the feeling I was above myself a bit to think a novice such as myself could presume to wield such advanced tools.

He intimated also that he was not fond of cute endings, which definitely described the story, and to my amazement concluded the letter by saying he was going to purchase the story. That wasn’t where I thought he was going at all.

Eric was right about dialect. However I got some help from a native speaker who cleaned up my errors and changed the form of the name I’d used to reflect a male when I’d used the female form in error.

Jim Baen’s Universe was discontinued. They bought first use only so I retained the other rights. I published “Common Ground” on Amazon/Kindle, but as a novella it has not attracted any attention even at 99¢. I’m going to bundle it with several other short stories and sell them together. Perhaps that will be better received.

I was perhaps spoiled by selling my first story immediately. I had an aunt who wrote all her adult life and had three full size filing cabinets full of manuscripts. She felt it was just a matter of selling ONE story and when she had her foot in the door all that copy she had created would sell and she’d be sitting on a gold mine of back-copy. Truth was she wrote Christian literature for children that was wretched and had no market. But she never lost faith that eventually someone would buy it. Personally I’d rather be spoiled.

 

 

Carpet of autumn leaves – UP

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the fall. The leaves are on a carpet of pine needles. Five pics. Click for full size.

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