“Minus,” of course, were for being late and very untidy when he finally did arrive.
“I think I can bring myself to forgive you,” she said dryly. “Although I’m not certain just what exactly detained you.”
“Ah—besides a hobby of ancient history, Terran history, that is, especially military history and strategy, I, ah—I cultivate certain kinds of martial arts.” He ran his hand through his hair again, in what was plainly a nervous gesture. “Oriental martial arts. One soft form and one hard form. Tai Chi and Karate. I know most people don’t think that’s at all necessary, but, well, A and E Couriers are unarmed, and I don’t like to think of myself as helpless. Anyway, my sensei—that’s a martial arts Master—got me involved in a game of Go, and when you’re playing against a Master there is nothing simple about Go.” He bowed his head a moment and looked sheepish. “I lost all track of time, and they had to page me. I really am sorry about making you wait.”
Tia wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. “Sit down, will you?” she said absently, wondering why, with this fascination with things martial and military, he hadn’t shown any interest in the Military Services. “Do you play chess as well?”
He nodded. “Chess, and Othello, and several computer games. And if you have any favorites that I don’t know, I would be happy to learn them.” He sat quietly, calmly, without any of Garrison’s fidgeting. In fact, it was that very contrast with Garrison that made her decide resolutely against that young man. A few months of fidgeting, and she would be ready to trank him to keep him quiet.
“Why Terran history?” she asked, curiously. “That isn’t the kind of fascination I’d expect to find in a—a space-jockey.”
He grinned. It was a very engaging, lopsided grin. “What, haven’t you interviewed my classmate Chria yet? Now there is someone with odd fascinations!” Behind the banter, Tia sensed a kind of affection, even though the tips of his ears went lightly red. “I started reading history because I was curious about my name, and got fascinated by Alexander’s time period. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, every present I was getting was either a historical holotape or a bookdisk about history, and I was actually quite happy about the situation.”
So he did know the origin of her name. “Then why military strategy?”
“Because all challenging games are games of strategy,” he said. “I, ah—have a friend who’s really a big games buff, my best friend when I was growing up, and I had to have some kind of edge on him. So I started studying strategy. That got me into The Art of War and that got me into Zen which got me into martial arts.” He shrugged. “There you have it. One neat package. I think you’d really like Tai Chi, it’s all about stress and energy flow and patterns, and it’s a lot like Singularity mechanics and—”
“I’m sure,” she interrupted, hauling him verbally back by the scruff of his neck. “But why didn’t you opt for Military Service?”
“The same reason I studied martial arts—I don’t like being helpless, but I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he replied, looking oddly distressed. “Both Tai Chi and Karate are about never using a bit more force than you need to, but Tai Chi is the essence of using greater force against itself, just like in The Art of War, and—”
Once again she had to haul him back to the question. He tended to go off on verbal tangents, she noticed. She continued to ask him questions, long after the time she had finished with the other brawns, and when she finally let him go, it was with a sense of dissatisfaction. He was the best choice so far, but although he was plainly both sensitive and intelligent, he showed no signs at all of any interest in her field. In fact, she had seen and heard nothing that would make her think he would be ready to help her in any way with her private quest.
As the sky darkened over the landing field, and the spaceport lights came on, glaring down on her smooth metal skin, she pondered all of her choices and couldn’t come up with a clear winner. Alex was the best—but the rest were, for the most part, completely unsuitable. He was obviously absentminded, and his care for his person left a little to be desired. He wasn’t exactly slovenly, but he did not wear his uniform with the air of distinction that Tia felt was required. In fact, on him it didn’t look much like a uniform at all, more like a suit of comfortable, casual clothes. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine how he managed that.
His tendency to wander down conversational byways could be amusing in a social situation, but she could see where it could also be annoying to—oh—a Vegan, or someone like them. No telling what kind of trouble that could lead to, if they had to deal with AIs, who could be very literal-minded.
No, he wasn’t perfect. In fact, he wasn’t even close.
“XH One-Oh-Three-Three, you have an incoming transmission,” CenCom broke in, disturbing her thoughts. “Hold onto your bustle, lady, it’s the Wicked Witch of the West, and I think someone just dropped a house on her sister.”
Whatever allusions the CenCom operator was making were lost on Tia, but the sharply impatient tone of her supervisor was not. “XH One-Oh-Three-Three, have you selected a brawn yet?” the woman asked, her voice making it sound as if Tia had been taking weeks to settle on a partner, rather than less than a day.
“Not yet, Supervisor,” she replied, cautiously. “So far, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve found anyone I can tolerate for truly long stretches of time.”
That wasn’t exactly the problem, but Beta Gerold y Caspian wouldn’t understand the real problem. She might just as well be Vegan. She made very few allowances for the human vagaries of brawns and none at all for shellpersons.
“Hypatia, you’re wasting time,” Beta said crisply. “You’re sitting here on the pad, doing nothing, taking up a launch-cradle, when you could already be out on courier-supply runs.”
“I’m doing my best,” Tia responded sharply. “But neither you nor I will be particularly happy if I toss my brawn out after the first run!”
“You’ve rejected six brawns that all our analysis showed were good matches for your personality,” Beta countered. “All you’d have to do is compromise a little.”
Six of those were matches for me? she thought, aghast. Which ones? The tofu-personalities? The Valkyrie warrior? Spirits of space help me—Garrison? I thought I was nicer and—more interesting than that!
But Beta was continuing, her voice taking on the tones of a cross between a policeman and a professorial lecturer. “You know very well that it takes far too long between visits for these Class One digs. It leaves small parties alone for weeks and months at a time. Even when there’s an emergency, our ships are so few and so scattered that it takes them days to reach people in trouble—and sometimes an hour can make all the difference, let alone a day! We needed you out there the moment you were commissioned!”
Tia winced inwardly.
She’d have suspected that Beta went straight for the sore spot deliberately, except that she knew that Beta did not have access to her records. So she didn’t know Tia’s background. The agency that oversaw the rights of shellpersons saw to that—to make it difficult for supervisors to use personal knowledge to manipulate the shellpersons under their control. In the old days, when supervisors had known everything about their shellpersons, they had sometimes deliberately created emotional dependencies in order to assure “loyalty” and fanatic service. It was far, far too easy to manipulate someone whose only contact to the real world was through sensors that could be disconnected.
Still, Beta was right. If I’d had help earlier, I might not be here right now. I might be in college, getting my double-docs like Mum, thinking about what postgraduate work I wanted to do. . . .
“I’ll tell you what,” she temporized. “Let me look over the records and the interviews again and sleep on it. One of the things that the schools told us over and over was to never make a choice of brawns feeling rushed or forced.” She hardened her voice just a little. “You don’t want another Moira, do you?”
“All right,�
�� Beta said grudgingly. “But I have to warn you that the supply of brawns is not unlimited. There aren’t many more for you to interview in this batch, and if I have to boot you out of here without one, I will. The Institute can’t afford to have you sitting on the pad for another six months until the next class graduates.”
Go out without a brawn? Alone? The idea had very little appeal. Very little at all. In fact, the idea of six months alone in deep space was frightening. She’d never had to do without some human interaction, even on the digs with Mum and Dad.
So while CenCom signed off, she reran her tapes of the interviews and re-scanned information on the twelve she had rejected. And still could not come up with anyone she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she’d like to call “friend.”
Someone was knocking—quietly—on the closed lift door. Tia, startled out of her brooding, activated the exterior sensors. Who could that be? It wasn’t even dawn yet!
Her visitor’s head jerked up and snapped around alertly to face the camera when he heard it swivel to center on him. The lights from the field were enough for her to “see” by, and she identified him immediately. “Hypatia, it’s Alex,” he whispered unnecessarily. “Can I talk to you?”
Since she couldn’t reply to him without alerting the entire area to his clandestine and highly irregular visit, she lowered the lift for him, keeping it darkened. He slipped inside, and she brought him up.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, once he was safely in her central cabin. “This is not appropriate behavior!”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m unconventional. I like getting things done in unconventional ways. The Art of War says that the best way to win a war is never to do what they expect you to do—”
“I’m sure,” she interrupted. “That may be all very well for someone in Military, but this is not a war, and I should be reporting you for this.” Tia let a note of warning creep into her voice, wondering why she wasn’t doing just that.
He ignored both the threat and the rebuke. “Your supervisor said you hadn’t picked anyone yet,” he said instead. “Why not?”
“Because I haven’t,” she retorted. “I don’t like being rushed into things. Or pressured, either. Sit down.”
He sat down rather abruptly, and his expression turned from challenging to wistful. “I didn’t think you’d hold my being late against me,” he said plaintively. “I thought we hit it off pretty well. When your supervisor said you’d spent more time with me than any of the other brawns, I thought for sure you’d choose me! What’s wrong with me? There must be something! Maybe something I can change!”
“Well—I—” She was taken so aback by his bluntness, and caught unawares by his direct line of questioning, that she actually answered him. “I expect my brawns to be punctual—because they have to be precise, and not being punctual implies carelessness,” she said. “I thought you looked sloppy, and I don’t like sloppiness. You seemed absentminded, and I had to keep bringing you back to the original subject when we were talking. Both of those imply wavering attention, and that’s not good either. I’ll be alone out there with my brawn, and I need someone I can depend on to do his job.”
“You didn’t see me at my best,” he pointed out. “I was distracted, and I was thrown completely off-center by the fact that I had messed up by being late. But that isn’t all, is it?”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, cautiously.
“It wasn’t just that I was—less than perfect. You have a secret . . . something you really want to do, that you haven’t even told your supervisor.” He eyed the column speculatively, and she found herself taken completely by surprise by the accuracy of his guess. “I don’t match the profile of someone who might be interested in helping you with that secret. Right?”
His expression turned coaxing. “Come on, Hypatia, you can tell me,” he said. “I won’t tattle on you. And I might be able to help! You don’t know that much about me, just what you got in an hour of talking and what’s in the short-file!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said lamely.
“Oh, sure you do. Come on, every brainship wants to buy her contract out—no matter what they say. And every ship has a hobby-horse of her own, too. Barclay secretly wants to chase pirates all over known space like a holo-star, Leta wants to be the next big synthcom composer, even quiet old Jerry wants to buy himself a Singularity Drive just so he can set interstellar records for speed and distance!” He grinned. “So what’s your little hidden secret?”
She only realized that she’d been manipulated when she found herself blurting out her plans for doing some amateur archeological sleuthing on the side, and both the fact that she wanted a bit of archeological glory for herself, and that she expected to eventually come up with something worth a fair number of credits toward her buy-out. She at least kept back the other wish; the one about finding the bug that had bitten her. By now, the three desires were equally strong, for reading of her parents’ success had reawakened all the old dreams of following in Pota’s footsteps, dealing with Beta had given her more than enough of being someone else’s contract servant, and her studies of brainship chronicles had awakened a new fear—plague. And what would happen if the bug that paralyzed her got loose on a planetwide scale?
As she tried to cover herself, she inadvertently revealed that the plans were a secret held successfully not only from her CenCom supervisors but from everyone she’d ever worked with except Moira.
“It was because I thought that they’d take my determination as something else entirely,” she confessed. “I thought they’d take it as a fixation, and a sign of instability.”
All through her confession, Alex stayed ominously silent. When she finished, she suddenly realized that she had just put him in a position to blackmail her into taking him. All he had to do was threaten to reveal her fixation, and she’d be decommissioned and put with a Counselor for the next six months.
But instead of saying anything, he began laughing. Howling with laughter, in fact. She waited in confusion for him to settle down and tell her what was going on.
“You didn’t look far enough into my records, lovely lady,” he said, calming down and wiping his eyes. “Oh, my. Call up my file, why don’t you. Not the Academy file; the one with my application for a scholarship in it.”
Puzzled, she linked into the CenCom net and accessed Alex’s public records. “Look under ‘hobbies,’” he suggested.
And there it was. Hobbies and other interests.
Archeology and Xenology.
She looked further, without invitation, to his class records. She soon saw that in lower schools, besides every available history class, he had taken every archeological course he could cram into a school day.
She wished that she had hands so that she could rub her temples; as it was, she had to increase her nutrients a tad, to rid herself of a beginning headache.
“See?” he said. “I wouldn’t mind my name on a paper or two myself. Provided, of course, that there aren’t any curses attached to our findings! And—well, who couldn’t use a pile of credits? I would very much like to retire from the Service with enough credit to buy myself—oh, a small planetoid.”
“But—why didn’t you apply to the university?” she asked. “Why didn’t you go after your degree?”
“Money,” he replied succinctly, leaning back in his seat and steepling his fingers over his chest. “Dinero. Cash. Filthy lucre. My family didn’t have any—or rather, they had just enough that I didn’t qualify for scholarships. Oh, I could have gotten a Bachelor’s degree, but those are hardly worth bothering about in archeology. Heck, Hypatia, you know that! You know how long it takes to get one Doctorate, too—four years to a Bachelor’s, two to a Master’s, and then years and years and years of field work before you have enough material to do an original dissertation. And a working archeologist, one getting to go out on Class One digs or heading Class Two and Three, can’t just have one degree, he
has to have a double-doc or a quad-doc.” He shook his head, sadly. “I’ve been an armchair hobbyist for as long as I’ve been a history buff, dear lady, but that was all that I could afford. Books and papers had to suffice for me.”
“Then why the Academy?” she asked, sorely puzzled.
“Good question. Has a complicated answer.” He licked his lips for a moment, thinking, then continued. “Say I got a Bachelor’s in Archeology and History. I could have gotten a bottom-of-the-heap clerking job at the Institute with a Bachelor’s—but if I did that, I might as well go clerk anywhere else, too. Clerking jobs are all the same wherever you go, only the jargon changes, never the job. But I could have done that, and gotten a work-study program to get a Master’s. Then I might have been able to wangle a research assistant post to someone, but I’d be doing all of the dull stuff. None of the exploration; certainly none of the puzzle-solving. That would be as far as I could go; an RA job takes too much time to study for a Doctorate. I’d have been locked inside the Institute walls, even if my boss went out on digs himself. Because when you need someone to mind the store at home, you don’t hire someone extra, you leave your RA behind.”
“Oh, I see why you didn’t do that,” she replied. “But why the Academy?”
“Standards for scholarships to the Academy are—a little different,” he told her. “The Scholarship Committees aren’t just looking for poor but brilliant people—they’re looking for competent people with a particular bent, and if they find someone like that, they do what it takes to get him. And the competition isn’t as intense; there are a lot more scholarships available to the Academy than there are to any of the university Archeology and History Departments I could reach. All two of them; I’d have had to go to a local university; I couldn’t afford to go off-planet. Space Academy pays your way to Central; university History scholarships don’t include a travel allowance. I figured if I couldn’t go dig up old bones on faraway worlds, I’d at least see some of those faraway worlds. If I put in for A and E I’d even get to watch some of the experts at work. And while I was at it, I might as well put in for brawn training and see what it got me. Much to my surprise, my personality profile matched what they were looking for, and I actually found myself in brawn training, and once I was out, I asked to be assigned to A and E.”
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