April

by Mackey Chandler

  "Well we are not shoveling much shit today, so I have my other hat on. What did you need? Should I put on my escort service hat and be your bodyguard for dinner?" he asked, shuffling invisible hats with his hands, "or something else?"

  "Do you have a hat for the martial arts?" The mention of dinner unnerved her, because she could see John as an ally, but wasn't sure if she could deal with him socially. So she ignored that. "I saw your interchange with Jeff and wondered if you could tell me about a few things."

  "I'm not really qualified as an instructor, nobody I know up here is, but there are a few of us who work out together and he honored me by calling me teacher, because I shared what I could with him as he had no formal instruction. It's nothing I could ask him to do. Are you interested in learning?" Jon asked.

  "Maybe, beside the unarmed skills, do you know anything about weapons?"

  "A little. A few people have practice weapons. What sort do you have in mind?"

  "Let me show you." She got the long sword and returned to the console and instructed it to go wide angle on the cam. She drew the blade and it was too heavy to hold horizontal, so she rested the back of the blade on her left forearm on the fabric. She could not see any reaction from Jon, which was sort of a reaction in itself with him.

  "That's not a practice weapon," he stated flatly. "Not even a reproduction is it?" he asked.

  "No and I have the shorter one it matches also."

  "Could you show me it also, please?"

  She put away the long one and drew the shorter version.

  "They're beautiful. Could you roll the blade to let the light play on it?" he asked.

  She rolled the blade on its back for him.

  "There are museums that would kill for those, do you understand?"

  "You're welcome to see them yourself Jon," she offered. "They're what moved me to ask for help. I wondered if you could teach me the basics of handling them, without hurting myself and looking foolish."

  "I think we can arrange something. The discipline Jeff and I study usually uses a little different sword, which is straight and sharpened down the back edge a little bit, but I don't see why you couldn't do the same exercises with what you have. I would start with the small sword, because the other will be too much for you until you have some stamina. You really need the unarmed skill as a base first though. Would you like to join us Wednesday in the gym, at 19:00?"

  "Yes, Thanks Jon. I'll see you there."

  In the living room she was happy to find her mom relaxed on the couch, with some quiet music playing and had a friendly chat about her visit with her parents and Australia. She got a good sense how the political situation was, from her mother's tale of stares and rude remarks in public places. It seemed she had gained some merit with her mom, because her grandparents agreed to investigate a move to live with them. Apparently it was the first crack in a solid wall of resistance.

  Bringing up the idea the government might try to take the family investment away or act in any way against the station, ran into a wall of disbelief as solid as her grandparent's objections to leaving their home. Her mom felt sure if they took the Rock, the very least they would have to do would be to reimburse the funds spent to bring it into orbit. So at worst it would be a lost opportunity, but not "money down the drain. She suspected her mom was a little naive about political things.

  It was quite a load by the time she gathered up her box of laser heads, a few capes and her pad and scanner to go to Heather's. It seemed like she had something to carry now every time she went out.

  * * *

  She followed Heather's directions to E Ring - Deck 3 – Door Seventeen. April thought she had been on every corridor in the station, but if she had been up here she could not remember when. She positively had never been in Heather's home before. She didn't know if she hadn't been asked because it was a privacy thing, or if Heather was embarrassed about it. E Level was the innermost residence ring, only about a half G. It was definitely not the high rent district. It was even less desirable than the Singh home. A little roughness was expected, but the corridor turned out to be hard floor instead of carpet. Well not hard, more like rubber mats. There was a mix of strong odors in the air and not all of them were pleasant. There were still sound deadener panels on the walls but no decoration and it was noisy when the electric freight carts went by.

  By the time she got to their door three had gone by, the last with a driver actually towing a trailer, with cartons stacked on it under elastic netting. This appeared to be more an industrial area than residential. She resolved no matter how rough it was, she would show not outward sign of disapproval.

  The door looked pretty industrial also, double-wide opening down the middle. It was painted black metal with a flat screen at eye level. On it three options were presented. To the left of each line of text was a rectangular button icon which said PUSH. The first said, "Push - and announce yourself." The second said, "Push - for Grand Entry." The third said, "Push - Constables, Collectors and Officials."

  What the heck. April thought and punched the icon for "Grand Entry" bracing herself for a siren, or a really load buzzer.

  The screen dropped the menu and a scene appeared of a stone hallway with men on each side, in some sort of archaic uniform. There was a man standing with his back to her, so his head and shoulders filled most of the screen. There was the murmur of a crowd from beyond him. He seemed to become aware of April and turned to look in her eyes. How the program did it she didn't know. It was pretty slick. The image seemed to actually stare right in her eyes.

  The face was an older dignified gentleman and his white hair was elaborately curled and shaped with ribbons on the back gathered part. She didn't recognize it as a wig. His long coat was even more elaborate and threaded with more embroidery and gold buttons than the men who lined along the wall. He inquired of her, "May I have the pleasure of announcing you, my Lady?" Addressing her correctly meant the door had to have facial recognition software, which could determine her gender. That was difficult to do at her age. It was the sort of AI screening program she found really irritating when calling someone's pad. But it was sort of amusing here.

  "Yes, please announce April Lewis," she requested.

  The figure turned and walked to doorway behind and made a motion with his left hand. The three uniformed figures on each side whipped up a huge long straight horn and blew a short but alarming flourish. One started and after a few notes each in turn would start up until they were all blowing the same urgent fanfare.

  It sounded a lot like something April had heard before a horse race onetime on vid. The fellow had a huge staff with ornamentation in his right hand. He raised and cracked on the stone floor twice. It was like a gunshot, with an echo from the huge room beyond him. The rumble of sound from beyond him immediately dropped off.

  "Gentle people, it is my pleasure to present the Honorable April Lewis." He turned and cleared the way to the door and stood in a shallow bow for her.

  Heather yanked the door open with a smile on her face.

  "Mom always likes it when someone picks the Grand Entry. Come on in."

  The entry was similar to hers at home, but bigger. It had a cabinet which had to be for pressure suits and it undoubtedly it was an airlock also. There was the same covered control panel in the wall. However it was L shaped instead of straight through. When you looked straight in, the end wall was a clear panel covering a sculptured glass slab. The light was deliberately dim on this side to make the panel backlit. The glass had various textures of frost and sandblast and areas which seemed hand worked in parallel or cross hashed scratches from diamond tools. The subject was a life size Great Blue Heron, standing beside reeds in shallow water.

  The more she looked the more detail came out to her eye. A dragonfly hovered over the reeds and a frog at their roots. In the opposite corner from the reeds a Willow branch dipped toward the bird. The details extended under the surface of the water as well. The carving was not painted in, but it
had a subtle hint of color. When she looked closely she could see there were fine lines of color along the edge of the recessed area, which seemed to play off the contours behind them. Heather stood quietly letting her thoroughly inspect it, without rushing her. It would take hours to absorb it all.

  "Mom does nice work doesn't she?" Heather asked.

  "I have never seen anything this stunning, unless it was in a museum or an art institute. It's just beautiful."

  "She's working on another panel right now. Come on and let her show you."

  The space they stepped into was almost as big as the cubic the Lewis family occupied. The main room had an open center length of about 20 meters. After they had partitioned off an apartment for her grandpa, the Lewis cubic didn't have any open space left as big. It was not only low G, but also the ceiling was low all along one side, being in the inner surface of the torus shape of the station segment.

  The space was very thoughtfully used. April could see through an open door where the low ceiling area was used for beds and there was a work bench and com console in the low space where she could see Jeff working with his back to them. Further down there was even an area where she could see plants and flowers growing behind a sheet of plastic film, where the space was only waist high. There were lots of other plants scattered about the room.

  They probably ran a surplus on their air bill with all the greenery. Compared to her family's apartment it was really cluttered, but it worked for them. The noise and harsh smells in the hallway didn't intrude at all. There was a rich smell of slow cooking and there was a low background noise of soft jazz, with an occasional riff of a solo horn which drew your attention back when you started to forget it was there. April found the whole place very comfortable and domestic, not industrial as she had feared.

  Heather's mom was working at a rolling table with a large flat screen and a professional video camera on a powered tripod. There was large Oriental rug beyond her with no furniture, but a background screen with a fruited olive branch hanging down printed on it. April had never seen such an impressive, real, Oriental rug. It was about four by six meters. She didn't notice Barak, Heather's little brother sitting at his mom's feet, until he turned his head to look over his shoulder and smiled at her.

  "OK Barak. On the mark again, please." She looked over at April and smiled. "I'm Sylvia, April. One more shot here and I think we'll have it wrapped and we can talk."

  Barak went out on the rug and put his right foot forward on a piece of tape on the floor.

  "Now go down and go through a practice motion to get the feel. Then we'll want you to actually leave the floor." Sylvia commanded. You want the olive. You are happy. Maybe even a little goofy and your eyes are pointing past your hand as you reach. When the background is added in your eyes will be on the olive, like it is above you not behind on the screen. Try it."

  Barak uncoiled and stretched with his hand above him, but stopped on tiptoe and came back down.

  "Looks good, now go ahead on my call and actually leave the deck enough to get your foot stretched out behind you."

  Barak crouched down and his mom said, "OK – now," keying the camera and a green light lit on top of it. He uncoiled deceptively slow in the half G, but gracefully left the ground and trailed his foot behind him extended. His hand reached up ready to grasp

  "Per-fect," Sylvia said slowly. She hit a few keys showing the motion even slower than life, although it already had a floating quality in half G. She tapped a key three times, as he reached full extension on the screen. The three frozen screens displayed and she thoughtfully picked one and brought it to a full size. The branch and olives looked to be overhead in the image, but she surrounded them with a sweep of the cursor and moved them to the right a little and stopped looking at it.

  "It needs to be a little more elusive Mom," Heather offered. "It looks too easy right now. You want the sense it is going to be barely within his reach to get his finger tips on them."

  "You're right," Sylvia agreed and shifted the branch back a little higher, Then she drew a line through Barak's image from reaching hand to trailing foot and told the computer by voice,

  "Elongate on this axis two percent." She considered the image a moment and said, "Again, another one percent."

  "Why did you do that?" Barak asked from beside his Mom.

  "Because someone's too fat," she said, pinching a generous fold of skin beside his belly button securely between finger and thumb, while his attention was on the screen. He jumped back a lot harder than he had on camera with an indignant squeal.

  "It's a wrap." She admitted. "You can go shower to get the makeup off and we'll have supper."

  He took off without having to be told twice, still holding his hand protectively over the ticklish spot.

  "So will this be a big carved glass panel, like the Heron in the entryway?" April wondered.

  "Yes, there's a Lebanese gentleman who is getting six panels like this, which will be around his dining room with back lighting. Supposedly this one is celebrating his carefree youth. Knowing what Lebanon was like when he was growing up, I'm pretty sure it is pure fantasy, but he's the one paying for it," she said with a big smile.

  "How in the world do you sell something like this?" April asked.

  "If you mean - How do you let go of it after pouring all your heart into it? It isn't easy some times. If you mean - How do you market it? Most of them are done on a commission. Usually by word of mouth. The Lebanese fellow buying these came to us because he had been the guest of a Saudi Prince, who had twelve panels in his bedrooms celebrating his devotion to his wives." Her eye rolling expression and emphasis on devotion made clear they were probably pretty risqué.

  "The Saudi actually came up and visited, to see some of my work before he commissioned me and we had him to supper just like we're having you tonight. He made it quite clear there was room for a few more panels, if Heather wanted to go back home with him, but she missed her big chance." Heather was blushing and said indignantly; "This was two years ago! So I was only a year older than April is and the old goat was all smiley with me and ready to add me to his harem just as casually as if he was buying another panel. It wouldn't have bugged me so much," she told April, "but my mom thought it was hilarious."

  "In a few years you'll look back on it from my age and realize how much it bugged me, that if he was in the market he didn't even consider me while you were in the room. It wasn't exactly a big ego builder. He may be a real old pervert from our cultural view, but base line is everybody likes to be considered attractive, no matter what the cultural perspective. So you have to at least give him credit for finding you "delightful". Beats him asking politely what happened to the kid's face and can they fix it?"

  "You mean he bought a shuttle ticket, basically just to come shopping here?" April asked. She was thinking what kind of money was casually implied. A subject change was good too, to get Heather away from her indignation.

  "Oh, this fellow doesn't have to buy a ticket. He has a four seat Scaled Composites LiteLifter and a pilot, but he can sit the right seat himself. Since he was up anyway, he went over to New Las Vegas for a few days when he left here. He is the sort of fellow who could lose or make as much gambling as he spent on the panels and it wouldn't mean anything to him. Don't worry, we made sure he paid enough."

  April was impressed. There were perhaps two hundred private pleasure craft, which could make orbit or do ballistic flights to other points on Earth. It took serious money and connections to own one.

  "But let's get some supper and then I understand you want to see something Jeff is working on. Heather, why don't you two get some tomatoes and send Jeff to set the table?"

  Heather lead April past Jeff and sent him on a mission to the kitchen. It was hard not to stop and look at their project on the bench, but Heather kept right on walking to the area set behind clear plastic film, where the ceiling curved down toward the floor. April dumped her box of laser heads on the bench and hurried after h
er. She peeled back a section of film and touched a corner to a tacky spot which held it.

  April could see some of the plants were in individual bags. In fact some individual big tomatoes were sitting on some sort of gauze cushions. She spread a zip seal seam running up the side of the nearest and reached inside to take a couple huge beefsteak tomatoes off the vine. April would have expected her to cut them off, but she pulled them off with a twisting, rocking motion. and they readily separated

  "We bag some of them, because they are gene mod to respond well to a high CO2 atmosphere. See the little plastic tubes going in the corner of the sack? It keeps a steady slow flow of fresh gas and the outgoing gas has the ethylene and some other things removed. The little grow lights above each plant ramp up during the night, when our regular lights are off. They make a night light too."

  She handed a couple of the fruit to April and got a couple more before sealing the bag and curtain back shut. She led the way back to the kitchen and April saw Jeff was efficiently setting the table. He seemed at home and knew where everything was. That gave her the impression he must spend a great deal of time here.

  Heather washed the tomatoes explaining what she was doing and April suddenly realized she was being instructed. She might be set to work on another visit, doing this task just as Jeff was setting the table. Rather than making her feel less than company, she was surprised to find it make her feel accepted. Heather pulled a long chef's knife from a rack and sliced the tomatoes with easy single strokes. The way the edge passed through the skin with no indentation or hesitation, made it obvious the edge was very sharp.

  The tomatoes were such a deep dark red they almost had a purple tone. Heather put them on individual serving plates as she cut and then misted them from a container of olive oil. This led to a deep discussion of the merits of various grades of oil, which continued on even as she ground fresh pepper onto the oiled slices. The final touch was a dollop of fresh soft cheese sprinkled with herbs, on the center of each slice. They both carried the platters to the table.