Once Jotar made the mistake of letting the conversation wander around to the subject of starships. She gazed at him with true adoration while he spoke, so he spoke with increasing fire and clarity.
She cut in. "Your intelligence makes you so sexy I can't stand it anymore!" And with that thought she pulled him off to the bedroom where she called up her secretaries, instructing them to handle all incoming communication.
First she undressed Jotar. Then she posed him for inspiration. Then she took out her paints and began to decorate his body while he watched in the mirror-screen. Whenever she asked for his advice he praised her. His ear itched.
She became so enthusiastic about her masterpiece that she called in her secretaries to help photograph him for her collection. They took endless photographs, developing them with different dyes, cutting, distorting, reposing him. He was pleased that she was pleased.
Once her assistants were dismissed, Director Katalina had him carry her to the bed. "Do you remember how I like it, you big beautiful rascal?"
He did. By morning he was suffering a bad attack of anxiety. He had done everything conceivable to please her and she had never given him an opening. In desperation he decided to serve her breakfast in bed. He knew a recipe he was sure the robocooks didn't know because Kasumi had taught it to him, but he got caught in the kitchen by one of the secretaries who hadn't bothered to robe herself.
"Hi, big boy."
"Hi."
She began to fondle him.
"Look, I'm just trying to get some breakfast for her."
The secretary spoke some commands. "Let the robocook do it. I'd like to have you for a moment. I'm much younger than she is."
"The robocook isn't up to this particular dish."
"You don't understand, boy. I'm her executive secretary. Everything she acts on goes through my hands. You have to please me, too."
"I don't think she'd like that." He didn't dare remove the executive hands from his belly.
"She'll never know a thing, pretty boy. It'll only take us half a kilosec."
He got back to the kitchen while the just prepared breakfast was still hot, and carried it up to the Third Director, cursing the robocook and the secretary. The old woman smiled at him. She pulled him down and kissed him.
"You want something, don't you? What is it?"
Oh thank Newton! He sat down on the bed and composed himself.
"It's about your starship project, isn't it? You're broke. See, I know everything. You want money to continue. Money, money, money—that's all an Engineer ever thinks of."
"Sometimes," he said.
"What makes you think I'll give it to you?"
"All I wanted to tell you was that my starship is important to Lager."
She laughed. "We sell every starship we can make. Your venture isn't important for Lager, it is important for you."
Well, I tried.
She laughed at his misery. "You fool! What would I be if I couldn't do favors? Don't worry. I'll handle everything. It will be all right."
He made love to her in gratitude and she enjoyed his total giving of himself.
Back at his central office, he waited three days. The government put him in bankruptcy to save him from the responsibility for his mistakes. They took over the project of building his ship. The sudden loss of control shocked him: he had an office but no command lines. His faith in the power of sex was shaken.
Then Kasumi timorously announced that she was pregnant.
Jotar did his best to get the State to take over his debt to Akira but the reorganized project refused to underwrite Akiran interests. With that blow Kasumi's father and three of his closest associates committed suicide.
Kasumi called. Jotar refused to see her. He wanted to see her but he couldn't face her. He began to drink heavily. He disconnected his communicator. Finally he put his furniture and library in storage and disappeared. Nobody knew where he was because he was on an island beachcoming with a woman who had run away from her husband but would probably go back to him when her money ran out. They had met at a cafe in the Pleasure Basin and she had coaxed him into chucking it all with her.
One day while this woman helped him carve out an outrigger, the roasting sun at their naked backs, he told her about building the galaxy's greatest space canoe, a tale he embellished with truth, lies, puns, and emotion. The idea seemed hilarious to him, a fantasy laid on him by his mother when he was too young to reject it. The trouble was he wasn't sure it was a fantasy. Then for months he didn't think at all. He speared fish.
His woman left him, having learned more about canoes than she wanted to know. He drifted and another woman picked him up. Lusena was a distortion photographer who took pictures and fed them into a special computer. He was fascinated. By playing with the commands and selecting out only those image distortions that caused an emotional resonance the photograph evolved in color and pattern until it became a setting from one's private dream world. Jotar showed Lusena's art to everyone, raving about it for kilosecs. Lusena had a haunting dream world. All that came out when Jotar tried it were pictures of grotesque pinheaded women or elabyrinth long starships that faded complexly into the sky. Time passed.
Jotar was being supported by two waitresses from a local pub in their houseboat when his sister found him. Brother and sister, each seeded by a different Engineer, fought for days. They ranted themselves into a good mood by sunset whereupon he'd cook the three women a sumptuous meal, stews boiled in beer, beer cakes, beered chicken casserole, and the four of them would reminisce about childhood during the cool of the evening. In the morning the fight would start again.
She sneered at his unwillingness to drive ahead against all obstacles. She derided him for being ruled by the considerations of inferiors. She described what they were doing to his ship in his absence. She flattered his genius for seeing the piece of the puzzle that escaped all other eyes. She goaded his pride. She won. He went back to work.
When he returned to the project he was astounded that he was still respected. Genius had its prerogatives. He was astonished that he still believed in his ship with an insane passion. He worked hard. The ship had what he'd always wanted—government sponsorship. He was now willing to be humble when they told him that the fabrication problems needed research and time.
Half a kiloday passed before he realized that, even working, he had no control over the drift of the project. A whole kiloday passed before he saw the trend of the drift.
The project Engineers were solving problems creating solutions closer to something they already knew. As the total solution began to emerge, Jotar panicked. He ran in seven directions trying to trace down the individual decisions. He got passed from Engineer to Engineer to Craft Guild to Economist to Production Manager to Beer Hall.
Finally Keithe Walden took him hunting. Walden was the man in charge since the bankruptcy, an older Engineer, jowls sagging. He could make ten thousand men play choo-choo train in unison. They had it out in a duck blind with bugs buzzing around their heads.
"Keithe, I think you're full of meadow-muffins."
"Jotar, if you were redesigning a woman, you'd take off the breasts for streamlining . . ."
"Would I!"
"You'd take out the kidneys because they smell. You'd . . ."
"Now look! I like women the way they are!"
"No you don't. You'd have a thousand improvements if you thought about the problem for a kilosec. What changes would you make?"
"They'd be practical changes. I'd put in a servomechanism so that a woman could control her ovulation. Shreinhart showed that the immunological system could be vastly improved if it had better data processing capabilities. There's no reason bones should break or get brittle with age—there are much better materials. I think it is shocking that, kilogram for kilogram, solid state devices have more storage and logic capacity than neural tissue. How about an electromagnetic sense? And women certainly should have a penis to piss with."
"You could go on
and on, couldn't you?"
"Probably."
"That's what I mean. Then you'd start to fool with the genes so this new woman could reproduce herself—and you'd be in big trouble because of the incredible cross-correlative interdependence of the genetic interaction. Evolution is a slow thing. You can only change marginal things in something as complicated as a woman or a starship—and each change has to be proved out over generations before you can make the next incremental change. A man has 98% of the genes of a chimpanzee, remember that. You want too much change, too soon. You have to start with what you have."
"I'll give you a herd of horses," said Jotar, "and you can start breeding me a flock of birds out of them."
Jotar took up billiards and poker. He danced and wenched. He spent long days playing with his sister's children. Walden built a prototype ship and took orders for five hundred. It hit the news. LATO called it Jotar Plaek's ship and said it was the greatest starship ever launched.
Yeah. We changed the brass doorknobs to silver.
Two days later Misubisi Kasumi followed him home to his apartment. He didn't notice her until he went to close the door. A small girl was clinging to her leg. "Here is daughter you abandoned," she said bitterly.
Shock. "Hi." He went down on his knees but the child turned her face away in shyness.
Kasumi disciplined the child. She held her face toward Jotar. "You must see mean father who abandoned you."
Tears were running down Jotar's face. She was the first woman who had ever brought one of his children to see him. He was touched beyond anything that had ever happened to him.
"A beautiful kid. Your side of the family. Kasumi, come in. I'm sorry about it all. I got caught up in my own madness. I was destroyed like everybody else."
She marched into the richly furnished apartment, gripping the child's hand. "You seem to be doing quite well."
"I manage."
"You built your ship."
"It's not mine. They changed the grille. It comes in new colors."
"That's good enough for me. Take an order for twenty red ones."
"Sol's Blazes! I wish I owned one to give you! Nothing's mine! I control nothing!"
"You ruined us!" she screamed.
"Yeah, yeah. I ruined you. I won a lot by doing that. How have you made out? Do you still have your ship?"
"Yes."
"Thank Space for small blessings. Why are you still here on this fossilized world when you could be out on the Frontier where people are still alive!"
"The mission must bring back something."
"Have a shot of whiskey. I've got no sake. Some milk for the kid?"
"No thank you."
"So what are you going to take back that you can fill your holds with for free?"
"Knowledge."
"It's a good cargo. They don't sell it for free here."
"Since you left me I have had relationships with many of your Engineers." Her voice flowed like a starlight-stirred wind of helium on a sunless planet. "Each has given me something out of pity. I have enough to build industrial empire. I want you to give me everything you know about starships. You owe it to me."
"I'll give you my head in a pickle jar."
"Don't offend me. I hate you enough to kill you!"
"Sit down. I'm on your side. I'm ashamed. Let me think of the resources I do have." He paused. "I collected a fantastic library when I was a child. I'll give it to you. I'll give you the original plans of my ship." He laughed. "I'll give you the plans for that flying toilet bowl they built in my name. But," he slammed out with careful enunciation, "it wont do you any good. Knowledge is only valuable if it can be activated. What can you do with a riddle you don't ken?"
"My people are brilliant."
"I'm brilliant," said Jotar, angered. "If I hadn't grown up on Lager I'd know nothing about starships! Nothing! I could wallow in every computer memory about starships that has ever been recorded and I'd learn nothing!"
She glared at him with hatred.
"I'm not arguing with you. I'll give you all I can. Thank you for bringing my daughter." Impulsively he brought out a toy he'd bought for his sister's youngest. It was a transparent ball, feather light, hard. "Take it for her. She'll like it. It will talk to her and show her pictures that illustrate its story. It is a story kaleidoscope. It will never repeat the same story. Look. What's a wirtzel?" he asked the sphere.
"Once upon a time there was a wirtzel who lived in a cave . . . ." The surface was vibrating. Images were beginning to form. The child watched in fascination.
"Look at it, Kasumi! It would take your Frontier culture three generations just to understand the plans for that toy. Black Hole, woman. If it's knowledge you want, you need to take a university with you!"
She was crying.
Jotar hung his head. "What could I have done? Tell me. It was a disaster."
"You could have put your arms around me when I cry," she sobbed.
Kasumi left him in a turmoil. He thought all night about her, putting the pieces together. He could not sleep. He sat in a trance on the balcony, bathed in the light of the moon Schnapps, compiling memories. We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers! we can, we can, we can, we can, we can swig forty beers! Memories. The first drunken orgy when they had graduated from the Monastery, their vows of celibacy dead, singing, the mob, the screaming girls chasing after a piece of virgin, rioting, getting carried off by a flying wedge of amazons, to be young, to be proud that one could build anything. A long way from there to the duck blind. I'll give you a herd of horses and you can start breeding me a flock of birds out of them! Sarcasm. Maybe if one went back to the common ancestor of horse and bird you could breed a bird. A lot of breeding. Was Akira far enough back on the technological tree? Kasumi crying. You need to take a university with you! Why not?
He worked it out because she was leaving and his daughter was leaving and he had an irrational desire to go with them. His images were of them working side by side to build the ship on a world that cared.
To accomplish his purpose the ship of the Akiran trade mission had to be refitted. He still commanded that kind of resource. Its holds became a fifty person self-contained college subject to fast-time. He left room for six students in the crew's slow-time protective field. The best students could be cycled through slow-time with him and Kasumi so that he could work with them personally. He intended to breed the best students until shipwright decisions were in their genes. By the time they got to Akira he would be bringing with him a 400 kiloday old university. It would have more tradition and history than Akira itself. With that base he could build a great ship even out there on Frontier.
Jotar was short of students. Who wanted to burn up in fast-time for a goal they'd never live to see? Misubisi Kasumi ordered some of her crew to become students and being good vassals they obeyed. Jotar found four Monks who had flunked out and couldn't bear the thought of becoming mere Technicians. He took them. He took three Technicians and two Craftsmen. He found six women like his mother and took them.
Only when they departed did Kasumi tell him that she was going in fast-time, to die in repentance for failing to carry out her mission. He couldn't convince her otherwise. She said that she wanted to work directly with the college in its infancy, to see that it grew up understanding Akira, the place where the descendants of the first students would work. But he knew she chose that exotic way to commit suicide because she had not forgiven him.
Jotar saw Kasumi only once again while she was still alive. Their first stop was at the small star Nippon where he picked up ten students and bought a quantity of genuine Japanese genes. His original students had inbred and were already looking too Caucasian to be received smoothly into the Akiran culture. He had brought with him the frozen sperm of 1000 Engineers but he didn't want to have to rely on such a source.
Kasumi was old and wrinkled. They had communicated, but only through the time barrier where she lived 150 times as fast as he did. He was shy with her, his
sorrow at losing her still fresh in his heart. Nor was it real to him that his daughter was older than he was, his grandchildren adult.
Nippon was a red star and consequently the surface of Nippon Futatsu was unnatural to human eyes. Kasumi took him to a mountain inn where she served him tea at a tiny shrine in a ceremony he did not understand. He could feel her warmth. It made him apologetic but she only smiled and pressed his lips gently with her hand.
Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Page 40