She looked where he gestured, then looked again. He'd run a Monte Carlo of how many duplicate runs? In how long? I7 ran a month real time, an hour with serviles on both sides optimizing tactics on Morbius's house machine, and he'd run a good thousand sets -- on each of five plausible FEU strategies. "Thank you," she managed. "This was very generous of you."
"Oh, not at all," he answered. "Besides, we needed the tests for the sales angle -- `combat tested against the newest FEU threat'."
"We?" she asked blandly, paging through outcomes. An FEU force that didn't know about Pontefract tubes and fell for the disinformation schemes did poorly.
"Combat Simulators, Unlimited. Oh, you wouldn't know. I own a substantial part," he answered.
"I see," she said. CSU was an Index 100 Corporation, noted for regular and generous dividends.
"Understated as always, Peter," Copperwright said, announcing her entrance, "given we three own a majority. Once upon a time, when most businesses were not privately held, that would have meant we were fabulously rich." Copperwright favored Sandra with a warm smile. She considered Cheryl and returned it.
"Not quite that rich, not now," the Hexagon Lord said dourly, entering close behind Cheryl. Sandra favored him with an even warmer smile. "But it's enough to let me study an occasional tactical puzzle rather than needing to work all the time. Talking with you two and our charming young lady here is not work." He beamed at her. His clothing had returned to the gray and silver patterns that favored his hair. A blood-red scarf and matching belt provided a flash of color. "I see, however, that Peter has prepared the sideboard, and mysteriously not yet emptied it, so perhaps we could prevail on our young lady to lead the procession..." He gestured at the waiting plates. "Peter, I see you broke out the famous tactical puzzles series. I'm honored." Each of the dinner and salad plates featured a weave of hexagons and enameled polychrome icons, displaying a position from the Hexagon Lord's '100 Tactical Problems from City of Steel'.
The four worked their way through the sideboard, sat, and waited while Gustaphson poured a splash of plum-currant for each of his guests, and an ample glass for himself. "What is the date of today?" he asked casually.
Sandra froze. "The ninth of the fifth," Copperwright, seated opposite Sandra at Gustaphson's right, answered. Sandra’s three lunch companions reached forwards, taking their exceptionally sharp dessert knives and balancing them across their index fingers. Sandra scrambled to copy their gestures, ones she had had no expectation of seeing here.
"Quetzalcoatl," the Hexagon Lord said.
“Ba-al," Copperwright said.
"Nyarlathotep," Gustaphson echoed.
"Assur," Sandra responded, closing the series. This had to be real.
"We are gathered by the Sword," Gustaphson announced. Knives were placed back on the table. Copperwright and the two men crossed their fingers and touched their collars; Sandra cupped her hand below her throat. "I suppose Morbius neglected to mention who else we are," he continued casually. "The probability that you would randomly find yourself dining with three Masters of the Sword -- especially two male Masters -- is so low that we may have achieved tactical surprise. Did we?"
"You did," she whispered. "I didn't know there were two men in the Upper Order."
"Ideally," Gustaphson said, "no one would ever know there was an Upper Order. But if everyone thought there was no Upper Order, someone young, someone with initiative, someone with brains--someone like you--would identify the lack. And fix it. And then we would have two competing Upper Orders. Or three. Or..."
"Or however many we have," Copperwright finished, her eyes twinkling with the jest. "I'm surprised if it's fewer than five."
"Nonetheless," Gustaphson said, "We three gave the MinuteGirls their starting kick. Got Charles and Barbara and Morbius to do the work. That included the intellectual work, once the fundamental strategy was defined. We can still send word to whoever is out there. Without knowing any of them."
"I hope you didn't find our public personae too tiring, Sandra," Copperwright said. "It's our cover. Works too well, sometimes."
"Oh, not at all," Sandra answered blandly. She had already decided that their public personae were their real personae, implying that a significant part of the country's strategic leadership appeared to be in the hands of people who were each several bales short of full loads.
"We discussed this the other night," the Hexagon Lord said. "There was one best move. You saw where to go. You didn't see the minefields. They were planted before you were born. We agreed someone had to go there. So we volunteered you."
"We're most grateful," Copperwright said. "For volunteering, I mean. I dislike minefields."
"She can still bail out, if it looks too risky," Gustaphson said. Sandra's nostrils pinched. "It's not physically dangerous, lass. But it might be dangerous to the arc of your career and it might be pointless."
"Tell her," the Hexagon Lord suggested.
"You three eat," Gustaphson announced. "I'll talk. After your second century, eating is less critical. The direction, of course, was your suggestion that the tabby FEU delegate was from another world. There was no sense in talking about it at Morbius's. The audience was wrong. Most Americans can't imagine your possibility. 'from another world?' The words are grammatical, but they make no sense. It's as totally impossible as asking most Americans to study abstract mathematics. It goes back to 'science fiction is really European' and 'it has no practical use, so why study it?'."
"Perhaps the obvious alternative first," the Hexagon Lord said. "The obvious countries that have space travel dislike biosculpt. But there are countries that do biosculpt. And Cheryl found a reason for biosculpting tabby."
"Scandinavia," Copperwright said. "Specifically Sweden." She gestured. A holodisplay of the delegate came up with areas illuminated. "That tabby pattern, closely examined, is close to tiger fur. A tiger was a large cat -- extinct at the moment, except for cryostored cells." The display morphed into a truly large cat. Sandra allowed that she would not want to fight one with her bare hands. "They were hunted. For their pelts. The pelts were used, well,..." she hesitated, "...they offered significant horizontal possibilities. For the delegate, that possibility is built in. My contacts in scenic central Nevada analyzed -- the other bodily rearrangements also had interesting horizontal potentialities."
"The FEU delegate is a boystoy?" a startled Sandra asked.
"That identification corroborates the hypothesis that it was an FEU construct," Gustaphson said. "We found a reason why someone might produce a creature like that. We still don't see why it became a delegate."
"I said that was an alternative," Copperwright said. "I didn't say it was a good alternative. There are others, I think. We should try to find them. Everyone else thinks Mr. Tabby was an FEU 'look what I've got'. Let's push on to your idea. We've never found a planet with many living things on it. Large telescopes and spectroscopy don't find places with interesting spectra further out than we've gone. There could be planets with lots of life. We just haven't found any. Of course, our telescopes only see our continuum, but warp point travel takes you to many different continua."
"Any ones with current life," the Hexagon Lord remarked. "But there are rocks. Though no one but me cares." He made the last point sound profoundly sad, and pointed at three large, irregularly globular stones that graced one corner of the table. "Those are stromatolites," he explained. "Once upon a time, back when people cared about abstract geology, young people would have known they were petrified flocs of bacteria. However, the first of these is from Ontario, and the others are from two different planets of Beta Virginis. Life did evolve there. Some cosmic accident snuffed it out a very long time ago. The start of your political problem is that most Americans neither know nor care about rocks."
"The other difficulty goes back to when I was a younger man," Gustaphson said, "back to the War in Viet Nam. There was a literary genre -- science fiction. It was divided between stories about people wearing armor and
riding horses into battle, and giant flying lizards..."
"Things allowed by laws of nature," Copperwright said. "This was the fantasy genre."
"...and stories about faster-than-light spaceships and antimatter bombs..." Gustaphson continued.
"Things forbidden by science, as it was then known. Hence 'scientific' fiction," Copperwright added.
"The genres still exist," Sandra noted.
"In any event..." the Hexagon Lord inserted.
"In any event," Gustaphson said, "the War in Viet Nam was controversial. People felt very strongly about its wisdom. One way or the other. One fine day the country's science fiction and fantasy authors wrote up a petition on the war. Sign Column A if you're in favor. Sign Column B if you're against. Both columns were very long." Sandra nodded, wondering where this was all going. "But the columns had a feature. A feature no one noticed. They weren't sub-genre random. The fantasy authors, mostly, were against the war. The hard SF authors, mostly, were for the war. Not everyone, every case. A few people were Republicans or Communists before they started writing. But that division propagated forward. There is no obvious rational reason for it. However, there was a political correlation with the subgenres. And we come..."
"To the Incursion," the Hexagon Lord said. "And there came the point at which the FEU and the Collaborationists decided to resort to 'emphatic means' to 'restore civil tranquility'. So they licensed the press. And put Peter and his whole political party into death camps. They didn't call them that. After a bit they saw how subversive science fiction authors were. Rather, they worked out that a bunch of them were right wing. And had trouble distinguishing our right wing from theirs. The FEU right wing is nasty by FEU standards. They knew that authors are politically dangerous because a hundred years earlier some half-baked French authors and deranged third-rate philosophers--What was that fellow's name? Sorter? Something like that--had been moderately influential in support of an unusually crazy FEU political movement. No, not TechnoDeism. That other one. The hard-SF authorial base, many of them, joined Peter and friends behind the wire. That does not, of course, include the far-right-wing author base that was vigorously supporting the National Unity Government, and that ended up being exiled to Europe."
“Of course, before the incursion, many people viewed Social Justice as being far left-wing, not far-right-wing,” Cheryl said. “They were anti-liberal; they just didn’t notice that at first.Matters became very complicated as sides switched.”
"On the bright side," Gustaphson said, "I got to lie in an unheated tent and hear Volume 22 of Hurricane Line being drafted. FEU forgot how much memory tablets had. And one night we found it convenient to depart our hosts. FEU forgot some of us had been in the military, knew about escape committees."
"FEU spent large sums paying people to write knights in armor with flaming swords fantasies -- aid to starving artists -- to distract the public," Gustaphson noted. "A shame more of those authors hadn't watched Aelita until they were sent the hint."
"Which they were. I made an effective tactical act. In any event," the Hexagon Lord said.
"The science fiction industry got wrecked. What survived imprisonment for subversion got clobbered by the Incursion Depression. The fantasy genre got a reputation -- mostly unfair -- for being Collaborationist when they were 'will write for food'. Scientifiction was tarred with the same brush, though they'd spent a chunk of the Incursion in death camps. Scientifiction joined early 19th century American geographic fiction," Gustaphson explained. "In big libraries, gathering dust. Now, this was a century and a third ago. But plenty of young people who survived the Incursion are alive today. Politically and culturally active. And all their attitudes are nailed in place. When you tried to tell Jacobsen about a scientifictional idea, why, when he was a ship captain he forbade sci-fi entertainment tapes on his ship. Don't ask me how I know that. His attitudes are fixed. His father got to stand with Charles and watch the young man in Concord get barbecued. Then that young man's sister was chained across the hood of a truck and...she was alive and physically mostly undamaged afterwards. When he thinks of something as 'slightly European' he has a specific meaning. Charles reads age-of-sail sea stories. Barbara, once upon a time, wrote detective novels."
"That audience couldn't hear you," Copperwright said. "I don't have the goods on them all, but it's a rock solid bet. You mentioned aliens. You might as well have advocated legalizing hoplophobic propaganda."
"From an operational standpoint you would have done better with hoplophobia, Sandra. 'Know the enemy' at least makes sense in English," the Hexagon Lord said. "Besides, when everyone knows hoplophobia is a contagious mental disease, it stops being very contagious." Sandra pressed her head in her hands. She had brought up an obvious idea. 150 years of history were not able to hear her.
"Brighten up, dear. It was an excellent idea," Copperwright said. "You just need the right people to plead your case. Fortunately, we're the Pi Musketeers, and we're here to help you."
"Besides," the Hexagon Lord said, "we all write the stuff under pseudonyms, and it would help the sci-fi market. Star Commando Jill has been very effective at that--she's one of Cheryl's better ideas--but she's mostly contemporary adventure fiction, and every bit helps."
"Sci-fi is hardly the most outrageous thing we have written," Gustaphson said. "There was this set of personal combat manuals for young girls, girls who had been gentrified to the point of fainting at the sight of blood. We disguised them as girls' contemporary adventure novels, but wrote them to teach combat arts." He paused. "Jane Treadway--Agent of Justice." Sandra's eyebrows raised. Jane Treadway novels were required reading for every MinuteGirl, mandated by a leadership that went on about how the novels defined character. Treadway did regularly face moral quandaries. But her character-building solutions dealt less with balancing ethical conundrums and much more with moral living through improvised high explosives, sharp objects, and retirement with extreme prejudice of villains and henchpeople.
"That is a slight exaggeration," Copperwright said. "The gentrification. But Morbius supports you."
"Which means," the Hexagon Lord noted, "If anyone really tries to lean on you for investigating aliens you say that The Savior of Our Republic, Morbius Himself, asked you to study this question."
"That will, experimentally, shut up anyone in their right mind," Gustaphson said.
"Unfortunately," the Hexagon Lord said. "Unfortunately, it will. You know, people, someday Morbius is going to make a catastrophically bad recommendation, catastrophically firmly. Everyone will be too busy kissing his backside to say he's had temporary brain failure. Then something terrible will happen." Sandra looked carefully at the Hexagon Lord. He sounded sadly wistful. Sandra had the greatest of respect for her employer. But the Lord's words weren't a jab at Morbius, just a concerned observation. An observation that he had strategically placed in front of the single American most likely in the next few years to need to remember it, and most open to hearing what he said.
"That's why we're here, Cheryl," Gustaphson said. "Because Pi Musketeers trump one Savior."
"Where do I fit in?" Sandra asked.
"You continue as a Morbius intern. That's partly cover, partly support, partly he hates losing good interns, partly he gives excellent training. But his projects are also our projects. Except we offer career opportunities," Copperwright said.
"Opportunities? With the game company?" she asked politely. That was not such a bad offer, but she'd had higher hopes.
"There would be an appropriate cover," the Hexagon Lord said. "Some of our recruits have discovered they truly enjoyed making new games. Games are, after all, homo ludi's highest possible art form."
He stopped talking. She raised her eyebrows. Each waited for the other to speak. "I have exchanged regards with the Dark Lady," the Hexagon Lord finally resumed. Sandra nodded politely. The MinuteGirls had high-ranking officers identified only by title. In wartime they would vanish from the face of the earth. "She's my channel to your Up
per Order. We're Masters of the Sword, we three. We influence training by preaching, not behind the scenes handwaving. She spoke very highly of you. She regrets you have the very specific and even rarer talents we need, because she'd hoped to induct you into the Upper Order instead of leaving you as a Mistress of the Sword."
Sandra swallowed. She had imagined someone might think about her induction in a few decades. If she stayed fit and recruited hard. Now that path was much closer. And much further away. "But who is 'we'?" she asked.
The three men looked at each other. "Vow of silence?" Copperwright asked. "This conversation stays with the four of us?"
Sandra thought carefully. Morbius recommended them. "I think I promised not to keep secrets from Morbius," she answered.
"He knows. He's the fifth. His current sweet young thing is not the sixth. We wondered if you'd remember him," Gustaphson said.
"Some of us wondered," the Hexagon Lord noted. "Some of us remembered who in the past week had explored my 'Tactical and Ethical Conundrums' Site, and their scores."
"I must be precise. Our secret is as thoroughly sealed as Speaking For The Darkness. Do you consent?" Copperwright asked.
Sandra swallowed. A MinuteGirl might be acting on the direct orders of the Dark Lady, and need to invoke the seriosity of her mission. In direst need, she could announce that she was Speaking For The Darkness. A MinuteGirl who claimed to be Speaking For The Darkness, when she was not, would be expelled, publicly denounced, and with fair likelihood meet with a fatal accident that always provably had nothing to do with the MinuteGirls. Sandra was reasonably certain that MinuteBoys who pulled the matching idiot stunt had their fatal encounter with a Mistress of the Sword.
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