A Larger Universe

by James L Gillaspy

  The first Jack's initial communications indicated that the child was a weakling and would not live to begin his classes with Forset. That had its own dangers. Lord Ull expected the books to be translated, and Valin's team had made little progress.

  After a time, the reports from the first Jack became contradictory, as if Jack didn't want to believe what he was seeing. And now this strangest tale of all, coming from the fourth Forset, of Tommy lifting the side of a barn and running down a giant bird. None of this made sense, though the creature standing in front of him seemed strong enough to perform such tasks.

  After almost three years of attempting to translate the books without this boy's help, Valin's life depended on Tommy’s doing as Lord Ull expected. Valin’s role in bringing Tommy here would make that certain. He must focus his attention on that. Somewhere in the bulky body in front of him must be a mind that could help them do the job Lord Ull had given him.

  Chapter Five: Everything is Relative

  "You do have a funny mouth,” Valin said, his expression hardening. “Either that or you think the lords are idiots, and that's not a safe thing to think. Your job is to teach us how to translate these books, so we can, in turn, teach others, until all the books are translated."

  "Forset told me you could already read and write English," Tommy said.

  Valin threw up his arms. "We can, but not this English! Every fourth word means nothing, and many of the words we think we know must mean something else. When we give the books we think we have translated to the artisans, they call them gibberish and give them back to us.

  "We had the books for three months before leaving Earth, and Lord Ull wasn’t happy with our results.” His face twisted into a sour smile. “Working with a lord can be stressful. The stress can kill sometimes. When my friend Berish told me of your transmission, I made him show me the recording."

  "You’re the reason I'm here?"

  Valin shrugged. "Well, yes, I suppose so. You seemed to know a lot about your computers. So I suggested to the lords that you could help us. Lord Ull ordered the landing that picked you up."

  Tommy walked through the eight artisans who had gathered outside the door and sat down in the chair at his desk. Valin's admission of being instrumental in Tommy's kidnapping first brought a rush of anger, then memories of home. "Why should I? Why should I help my kidnappers? Will helping you get me home? What's in it for me?" He put his head down on the desk.

  Valin grabbed his chair and spun it, forcing Tommy to lift his head. "You're here. Everybody works at the tasks they are given. If you don't, you will be given no food, no water."

  Valin addressed the others in the room. "Return to your tasks. We will continue without him. He will either help and decide to live or not and decide to die."

  Tommy turned his chair toward the desk and cradled his head in his arms. He felt like crying for the first time in months. He was getting too old to cry, wasn't he? Hadn't he saved someone's life this morning? That should prove something. What had he ever done to deserve this? He had never fit in, even at home. All he had ever wanted was to be left alone with his reading and his computer. Now, he was stuck here, with no way home, no computer, and nothing worth reading. What was the point in reading or translating computer books without a computer to work with? His eyes were red when he lifted his head, but he hadn't cried. So why do they need me? Why are they translating all those books?

  He turned to face the horseshoe. He had to know. "Why are you translating those books? What do the lords expect to get for them in trade?"

  Valin opened the door with the picture of a cog. "Because we need them in order to use these."

  Tommy had visited the company where his dad worked and had seen the computer room. That room had been clean and organized with the cables between the computer boxes hidden under a raised floor. The room behind the door seemed a mad version of that, with computers sitting haphazardly about the room and cables strewn about instead of hidden under a raised floor. He looked closer. None of the cables were connected to anything and the electrical plugs were lying disconnected on the floor.

  "We have a lot more than this," Valin said. "We took these samples from the main storeroom to try and get working. That's why we need the books." He made a rueful face. "We're accustomed to instruction books. That's what we usually translate and from many languages, most of them not of Earth. Every machine we take has one, but your computers have hundreds of instruction books. We don't know what's important and what's not. And the lords want these computers to function."

  Tommy circled the room, examining the stacked computer cases. Some looked new. Some were scratched and dented. Tommy bent over to look at one of these and started laughing. "This is an IBM AT. It must be twenty years old. A lot older than I am anyway. Somebody sold you a bunch of junk."

  This sent Valin scurrying to an undistinguished point on the workroom's wall, where he pressed his thumb hard enough to make it turn white. A small door slid into the wall under his hand exposing a grill and small keypad. After pressing a few keys, he talked rapidly into the grill. It had to be an intercom, the first Tommy had seen on the ship.

  Feron, the leader of the team that had traded for the computer equipment and books from Earth, met Valin and Tommy at a nearby storage compartment. His hands shook as he opened the compartment door. He stood to one side as Tommy looked into the warehouse-sized room.

  Hundreds of Earth-style pallets covered the huge chamber's floor. Each Pallet held stacks of boxes wrapped with wide sheets of clear plastic.

  Much of what Tommy knew about specific items of equipment came from reading and looking at the pictures in the many catalogs that he used to receive from computer equipment retailers. A few purchases made with his dad's credit card had gotten him on two mailing lists and then many mailing lists as the first companies sold their list to others. Those catalogs had been some of Tommy's favorite fantasy reading, full of things he would buy, if he had the money. He was reading a catalog the day his Dad brought up selling his download software. The money hadn't mattered to him, but getting the gadgets in the catalog had.

  With Valin's and Feron's help, he began unwrapping plastic and removing boxes from the pallets nearest the door and stacking individual boxes on the left and right side of the room: left for outdated, and right for at least relatively new. When they had unloaded fifteen pallets, the aisle between the left and right side was much closer to the right wall. This could take a week, he thought, and walked down the right wall, examining each pallet. Tommy had started back toward the entrance when he realized he hadn't seen a single box of software. He was about to reveal the futility of what they were doing when he found several pallets of software boxes in a far corner of the room.

  Tommy hadn't told his helpers why he had directed them to move the boxes to one of the two stacks. With his revelation that they had more old than new equipment, Feron slumped against one of the stacks, scattering a few boxes to the floor.

  "Will you and your family give comfort to my wife and children, my friend?" he said to Valin.

  Valin squatted down beside Feron and put his arm around his shoulders. "Of course. As you would to mine."

  "Will you wait until after I see them to tell the lords?"

  "You should tell the lords."

  "If I do, I must do so now. I want to tell my family goodbye. If you tell the lords, I'll have a few minutes to talk with my wife."

  Tommy looked from one man to the other. "Wait a minute. What's going to happen to you?"

  "The lords do not allow failure of this magnitude," Valin said. "Your feral brethren swindled Feron. He will pay with his life."

  "How will anyone know if we don't tell them?"

  Valin looked up at Tommy. "They will know, whether we tell them or not. Someone will tell them, or they will find out in some other way. If we delay, they'll punish me, too, and our wives and children will be punished.” Valin’s lips pulled back against his teeth. “You should consider yourself. Their an
ger will send you back to the stables permanently."

  "Wait a minute. Let's think this through, first," Tommy said.

  "What is there to think about? You have said most of these boxes contain outdated and useless equipment. You called it junk. The lords do not trade for junk."

  "Well, that was my opinion. I wouldn't have bought any of this back home, but it's not junk if you can use it for something. What were you planning to do with this stuff?"

  Valin looked at Feron. "What harm can there be in telling him? At least the lords didn't tell us not to tell him." When Feron nodded, Valin turned back to Tommy. "The lords plan to use your computers in this ship."

  "How?" Tommy asked. "How could Earth's computers be of use in a starship?"

  "You probably think the lords use computers throughout this ship, and that they're more advanced than those of Earth?" Valin asked.

  Tommy hadn't thought about it, but that did sound reasonable. How could the lords run a ship like this without computers everywhere? "Yes," he responded.

  "You would be mistaken. This ship does have computers, but the fastest one, the one used for navigation, is much slower and many times larger than those we saw advertised on your television. The lords use other, even slower, computers to maintain the environment and for tracking objects near the ship. All are larger than any of the computers in this room."

  "How is that possible?"

  "That's a mystery I can't answer. All we know is that the computers on this ship are centuries old. The lords were amazed at what they found when we last arrived at Earth. The progress you had made in just five years astounded them. One of them, Lord Ull, decided your technology would be useful."

  "What about the landers that took me? Don't they have computers? How could they evade radar and cloak themselves without computers?"

  "The lords traded for that technology in my grandfather's time," Feron said. "We fix what's broken by replacing with spare parts until it works again. When the spare parts are gone, the landers will be useless."

  "Couldn't the lords trade for more?"

  "They say not,” Feron replied. “And before you ask, it's dangerous to question the lords. Better to do as they tell you and live as if today is all you have.

  "When I went on the trading mission to get the computers we saw on your television, Lord Ull told me I must also find the means to repair them. The books are a part of that; you're the other," Feron said.

  Tommy laughed. "Well, if I hear you right, we're not in trouble after all."

  "What do you mean?" Feron asked.

  "As my Dad says, everything is relative. From what you've told me, most of the computers in this room are more advanced than any computer on this ship. That sounds weird to me, but it means that most of this is not junk. I'm not sure how we'll connect any of this to your systems, but it's not hopeless. Besides, you tell me I don't have a choice except to make these computers work. Not much of a choice. Do you think I want to go back to work in the stables? You have computers here!

  "I want to know one thing, though. Do you ever have problems with mice down here? The biological kind?"

  # # #

  Tommy and Potter weren't able to move until the following day, and that was hardly soon enough. Wherever he went in the farmers' part of the ship, people stared at him. Farmer boys followed him at a distance and turned away whenever he glanced at them. And he found the girls' actions to be incomprehensible. One of several girls always blocked the door as he passed, forcing him to brush past her. In the beginning, the girl would just make arm contact, always followed by a disconcerting giggle or a blank expression. As the day progressed and that got no response, the girl would force her hip or chest into him as he walked through the door.

  He realized, finally, that the girls were showing an interest in him, but he didn't have the slightest idea how to react. Maybe it would have been different if he felt any attraction, but they just didn't seem female to him. They certainly didn't look anything like the girls in his Atlanta school. These girls were almost indistinguishable from the boys his age on the ship and to their parents for that matter. They had the same narrow shoulders and tube shaped bodies. Even the adult women had almost no breasts, and the fifteen-year-old girls were as flat-chested as the boys. Physically, he and they could be different species. Why the girls considered him attractive was a mystery, even after he got an answer from Mark at his last evening meal in the farmers' meal room that explained the boys' behavior.

  Since the first rest day he and Mark had spent together, whenever they were in the meal room at the same time, they sat at the same table. Whoever got to the meal room first would save an extra chair for the other. On this night, Tommy was seated and eating when Mark entered the room. Tommy waved at him to come over, but Mark hesitated before sitting down beside him, and he was silent for a long while.

  "What's the matter?" Tommy finally asked.

  "Nothing. Nothing's the matter."

  "You're acting as if I have horns growing out of my forehead."

  Mark glanced over his shoulder at Tommy's forehead as if that might be a possibility, then hurriedly looked down at his food.

  "Something is wrong," Tommy insisted. "I thought we were friends. Why won't you tell me?"

  Mark turned toward Tommy. "I saw the stable. The whole corner of it collapsed. They say Jules was trapped under all of that."

  "Well, maybe not trapped under all of that, but he was trapped. So?"

  "They say you lifted the corner of the stable to get him out. They say you held it over your head as if it were nothing, and, after Jules was safe, you caught the bird that caused the accident."

  Tommy laughed. "That's the funniest thing I ever heard. I helped lift one beam, and someone else caught the bird. Who told you that?"

  "The other boys. They're afraid of you now, even the older boys."

  "Afraid of me? After I saved one of them?"

  "It's how you saved him. Only a warrior could do what you did."

  Tommy stared at him. "I didn't do all that. I'm not a warrior. I may be stronger than you are, and maybe warriors are, too, but that doesn't make me one."

  Mark shrugged and stared at his plate. He said just loud enough for Tommy to hear, "But you might be."

  "None of this is true. Even if were, what difference does it make?" Tommy asked.

  "I know you're different. You look funny, and you talk funny. That didn't matter much, but no farmer has ever been friends with a warrior," Mark whispered, his head still tilted toward his plate, "and I wouldn't know how to be."

  Later, Tommy didn't have a clear memory of the next few minutes or of leaving the meal room. He had been staring at Mark, wondering what to say next, when the edges of his vision became fuzzy, then sparkling with shifting nets of light that circled towards Mark's face, until only his face was visible. The light in the room became almost too bright to bear, piercing his brain through the blurry tunnel that had materialized in front of his eyes. Tommy stood, knocking his chair to the floor, and covered his face with his hands. He peered between his fingers and walked for the door, stumbling against chairs and people carrying plates of food. The sounds he heard were muffled as if someone had plugged his ears. What’s happening? What’s happening to me?

  The lights in the passageway outside were broken. Just standing with his back to the wall in the near darkness was an incredible relief. His head felt as if it would float away. The skin on his face felt tight, his hands were tingling. I must be sick, he thought. I have to go to my barracks and lie down. To the barracks. But how to get there? His head was thick with fog, and the passageway was distorted by the tunnel in his vision. Nothing seemed familiar.

  That tunnel disappeared as quickly as it had come, but in its place came a slamming pain between the eyes that left him gasping. He bent over and pressed his hands against his forehead. When that didn't help, he stood up and lurched down the passageway, through the crowd that had followed him from the meal room, in the direction he was no
w sure led to his barracks. He could think now, but he had to do it through the agony in his head.

  When he found Potter curled up on his bunk, he grunted, almost in relief. Someone had brought Potter down from the stable. He couldn't have borne a trip to the Commons. Tommy lifted Potter and thrust him into his carrier. The cat moaned.

  "Damn it, Potter. I know you hate being cooped up. This will only be for a few minutes. You ought to be used to it by now. Stop it, please. Please stop it."

  Tommy picked up the cat carrier and the bag containing the two changes of clothes he had been given. The tunnel in his vision had gone away, but the light still beat into his eyes.

  The trip downstairs didn't make Potter happy. Tommy repeatedly banged the cage against the walls, causing the cat's moans to turn into howls.

  Tommy had been given a bunk in a room designed for four, but which held no other occupants. Tommy blessed Valin for the favor, closed the door, and let Potter out of his carrier. He took a moment to set up the litter box he had brought in earlier and put out food and water for the cat, then turned off the light and curled up in his bunk. At some point he must have gone to sleep, at least temporarily smothering the pain.

  All the farmers woke to the same call each morning. Tommy usually had no trouble getting out of bed, but this morning sitting up sent a throb of pain through the back of his head. As long as he was still, the pain wasn't too bad, but a silent gong vibrated in his skull when he moved.

  Potter sat up at the foot of the bunk and cleaned himself, one leg held high above his head.

  "It would help, Potter, if you showed a little concern. I might have a brain tumor. Who would take care of you if something happened to me?"

  Potter's response was an almost inaudible "Meow," as he jumped off the bunk and trotted to his food bowl.