by Rolf Nelson
“Who bought your ticket?”
“I did, just–”
“It was bought with cash. Can you prove it was you?”
“I don’t know, I–”
“Stop lying!”
“I don’t think–”
“Lying to a government agent is a crime, Mr. Strom, so don’t think, just ANSWER!”
“But I did tell–”
Checker holds up her hand to silence him as she looks at the screen. “Well, well, well. And just why is it that you were sent a list of spices in commercial quantities, when you are not a registered and licensed wholesaler? A violation of the Terrorism-Supporting Black Market Reduction Act, perhaps?”
“How did–”
“You lied to me. That means a summary fine against assets, one per false statement.”
Helton’s shocked. “What?!”
“You were a teacher, but are now listed as unemployed. You lied. You said you were going on vacation, but you have a job offer from your sister. You lied. Someone bought your ticket with cash to avoid tracking, you lied. You are obviously attempting to dodge taxes and business licensing. You bought a one-way ticket indicating that you are an emigrant–”
“Because I didn’t know when I was coming back! I just now decided to go to–”
“But you still tried to dodge the emigration tax!”
“But how could I be emigrating if I’m planning to smuggle spices back here!?”
“Well, now, that WAS pretty stupid of you, wasn’t it? Didn’t think things through. Tell it to the judge! WE don’t make mistakes that stupid.”
Helton’s eyes widen with realization. A faint, deep CRUMP sounds in the distance, but Helton barely notices as he stares at the smug Checker.
“Escort Mr. Strom to Interview Room C for further questions.”
The guards step even closer behind him, and one indicates with his elbow which way Helton should walk. The Checker smirks. The other passengers studiously look away — at the ground, or at things in their hands — avoiding eye contact as the guards turn Helton and escort him away.
Helton sits at a small table in an undersized interrogation room, his coat over the back of his chair. Across the table is a uniformed guard with a weaselly face, blandly monitoring him and entering data into a tablet. The e-cigarette dangling listlessly from the corner of his mouth twitches when he asks Helton yet another question in the seemingly endless stream of trivial questions with answers he already knows.
An hour later, same room, different uniform. This one has more gold braid, a bigger hat, and a nervous tic; his eyes twitch as he reviews the information on his table. Helton sits as straight and dignified as he can, biting his tongue, doing his best to not make things worse.
The room is filled with a slight smoky haze. Helton sits across from a sour-faced woman with a pinched smile. She’s wearing the black robes of a judge. Gold Braid stands off to the side, smirking. The judge bangs her gavel on the small table between them, the door opens, and a pair of armed guards enter to escort Helton away.
The space liner’s lounge is sparse and spare, dim with the faint, reddish light that indicates the night shift. A few round ports and several screens line the walls above solidly mounted furniture. Helton slouches at an angle, half-facing Art, an elderly businessman with a dazed expression on his face and a drink in his hand, looking absently out one of the larger viewing ports. His coat is in a heap on another chair, and his bag supports his feet. “By the time it was over, virtually all my assets were forfeited on the spot, I’d been stripped of citizenship, and searched by the Blue Gloves way more personally than I’d like. How?” He shakes his head slowly in disbelief. “How did we get here?”
“It could be worse,” the old man says quietly. “You are here, yes?”
Helton stares at him, incredulous. “Well, yeah, but–”
“Not in jail. Not in uniform.”
“They wouldn’t–”
“Still breathing.”
Comprehension dawns on Helton’s face. He takes a drink, then says, “But I don’t understand. Why?”
“They get a percentage of any fines or forfeitures they assess, as an ‘incentive’ to be attentive to the letter of the law. Likely you were put on a list some time ago, and this was just the easiest opportunity to make you go away. If they hadn’t gotten busy with that bomb on Level Eight, you might still be there.”
“Wha…? Bomb? Nobody said anything about a bomb.”
“The disturbance that called them away?”
“But that was some sort of transformer explosion in an electrical vault…”
Art looks as him with a slight shake of his head and a knowing, apologetic smile on his face. “Always buy a round trip ticket. Always have the appearance that you have good reason to come back, and no plans to do otherwise. Terrorist, separatists, false flag — makes no difference.”
“You…?”
“You are just now realizing what’s been going on these last months and years?”
Helton says, feebly, not even accepting his own excuse, “Been busy.”
“People have had to flee on a moment, packing light, for thousands of years. The warning signs of collapse are always the same. The debt. The scapegoats. The lies. The ‘temporary emergency measures.’ I cut it closer than I should have.” Art shrugs and takes a drink from his own glass. “My family is all safely away, and everything else shipped ahead for us by others.” A small, sympathetic smile crosses his wizened face. “It looks like you won’t be returning, either.”
Helton looks at him in disbelief, frowning, brows knit. Quietly, in shock, he says to himself, “Homeless.” He turns his gaze back to the port, staring blankly.
“You are lucky, though,” Art says.
“If this is lucky, I’d hate to see unlucky.”
“They picked you clean, but they let you leave.” He looks intensely at Helton. “Think. What do you have? Where are you going?”
He shrugs, waves to his coat and bag. “My sister’s.”
“And?”
Helton shakes his head, still not sure what Art is asking. Art taps his temple, then his chest. Then waves to the room around them, at the glass in Helton’s hand. Slowly, forcing himself to think positively, Helton taps his temple. “I have … useful skills … and knowledge.” He touches his chest. “I’m heading for family … who will welcome me. Work. I’m not sucking vacuum or” he holds up his glass, “dying of thirst in a desert. Better off than Odysseus meeting Nausicaä.”
A big smile spreads across the old man’s face. “A man of education.”
“Not enough. Didn’t see this coming.”
“It will serve you well. Never forget your assets, just because you acquired some new liabilities. Have faith in yourself, and you’ll be okay. God works in mysterious ways.”
Helton looks at Art silently for a long moment. He drains his glass, unconvinced.
New Acquaintances
Helton walks down a passageway on the space liner. It has a sense of faded high-tech elegance. He’s dressed in his normal shipboard attire: collared shirt, earth-tone vest with several pockets, dark pants, five-finger style shoes. Several others head in the same direction, each with a different style of clothing, mostly of simple cut, but more stylish, in much brighter colors. As they walk, the ship’s announcement system drones in the background in a calm and pleasant female voice. “Passengers on B Schedule proceed to your assigned dining rooms on Level E, Corridor F, for the traditional first-night formal meet-and-greet. Your seating assignments will be at your tables if not noted on your ticket. Please arrive promptly at 1830…”
Helton and the other passengers turn and stream through a doorway into a large, low room with some two dozen oval tables that can seat ten people each. The dining room has the same sense of faded elegance as the passageway: a nice chandelier with a few lights not working, slightly worn upholstery on the seats, indirect lighting of inconsistent brightness, and colors that don’t quite coordinate
, as if the maintenance crew could not be bothered to find identical replacements.
Each table has a busy artistic centerpiece and a small sandwich-board style screen with a list of names on it. Many of the tables are full, or nearly so. Helton finds a table with several openings, glances at the seating screen, and wanders on. He finds his name on the screen at the next table with open spaces. Eight people are already seated: a doctor, a senator, a businessman, and their wives; the space liner’s engineer, an older man in a disheveled uniform; and a beautiful, well-dressed East Indian woman in her twenties. Everyone except the Liner Engineer greets Helton cordially. He takes a seat between the young woman and the Businessman’s wife.
“Howdy.” He picks up the slim, paper-like e-reader and scans it. Most of the items on the menu are asterisked, signifying synthetic. Helton’s selections light up as he taps them, and the price totals at the bottom. Meanwhile, his tablemates chat quietly among themselves. The background is noisy with the droning of other tables doing the same, the clatter of silverware, the hum of the air system and engines. He sets the menu down and looks up, now listening to what the others at the table are saying. The wives appear to be engaged in an esoteric competition concerning whose husband has the most status: the Businessman is a wealthy mining and manufacturing magnate, the Doctor is a neurosurgeon, and the Senator sits on several moderately important committees. Doc Local and Senator Snol are unconvincingly modest, playing up their importance while feigning to deprecate it. The Businessman, Penger Trask, is more sincere.
Helton glances at the young woman seated next to him and finds she is looking back. She’s wearing a lovely, brightly patterned dress, fine jewelry, has nice hair, and is very attractive. She nods in greeting.
“Helton. Hope I’m not taking anyone’s seat here?”
“Bipasha. No, it’s free,” she says. “I’m headed for Niven. You?”
“Yes. Visiting family.” He looks inquiringly at her.
“I just finished school, and my uncle has an import/export business there.”
“You don’t sound too thrilled about that.”
“I had kind of hoped that I could travel more and find a job on my own before my family talked me into anything, but… He’s an honest man with a good business, so I’ll work for a few years while I look for something with more excitement and possibilities. You? Any business, or just the family?”
“Well…” Helton says awkwardly.
“Running from the draft?”
“No! I served my time, but … it just got a bit complicated.” He takes a sip of water.
Bipasha’s skeptical. “Being a soldier is a perfectly respectable profession, if you are a good one.”
“Agreed, I just didn’t like the guys giving the orders. I’m a teacher now. Well … was. My sister is on Niven. Her husband needs some help. I was headed that way and things went off the rails.”
“Yes, lots of plans getting changed these days.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
They’re interrupted by a waiter with a tray. The plate he sets before Helton has only the barest resemblance to the “Lamb & Rice Pilaf, Vegetables*” he had ordered. Bipasha eyes her plate uncertainly. “This is vindaloo?”
“Hmmm,” says Helton, eying his own plate. “I’m sure it’s edible, even if it isn’t quite what you had in mind.” Tentatively, they each take bites of their respective dishes, look at each other, make faces, then shrug and keep chewing.
The starliner’s dining room is still full, but most of the food has been eaten, and most of the diners are leaning back comfortably around the tables, chatting, getting to know one another a little on the first night out. The obvious exception is the Liner Engineer, who sits tiredly in his seat, ignored by the others, ignoring most of his food.
A man in his mid-forties approaches Helton’s table. He looks like a well-to-do businessman: short hair, no whiskers, broad shoulders and powerfully built. He’s wearing a dark, conservative, almost Edwardian suit with brass buttons, a high collared shirt, jacket, and vest. He indicates the chair between Bipasha and the Doc’s Wife and introduces himself in a pleasant tone, “Lag. Is this taken?” The table responds in a chorus of “Oh, not at all/Please be my guest/Have a seat/Welcome.”
“Ah, thank you. Sorry I’m late. Always more details.” The others return to their conversations while Lag looks over the menu, makes a couple of rapid selections, and sets it down. He turns to speak to Bipasha, but the ship’s announcement system chimes, and the familiar calm female voice sounds.
“May I have your attention, please. Navigation has informed the Captain that due to a change in the regional subspace conditions and forecast our schedule will be somewhat altered.” A collective groan rises from the around the dining room. The passengers listen attentively and exchange looks.
“We still expect to arrive in Niven on the scheduled date. We will be detouring through a swirl headed our way, stopping briefly at a transfer station point outside of Eldari to exchange passengers, then continuing to Balltic and Niven. Ship time will be approximately five days, universal time about seventy-two hours plus a short time at Eldari for transfers. We will be arriving at the Eldari transfer point in about ninety hours. That is all.” The dining room erupts in murmurs of excitement, confusion, and relief.
Senator Snol thumps the table with his beefy hand. “I don’t understand; we’ll be on the ship for five days, but we will arrive at Niven in only three? And we won’t get to the transfer for ninety hours? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Yes, that’s impossible,” his wife agrees. “How can we get there before we leave?”
“No, we won’t,” Helton responds politely.
Liner Engineer looks at him acutely. The others look at Helton curiously, surprised at his plain contradiction of a powerful man.
“The details of FTL are complicated of course, but the basic idea isn’t. Universal time, how time passes in the conventional universe where we usually live, passes as a pretty constant rate everywhere. According to the clocks on Niven and where we just left, we’ll arrive in-system in three days. But time moves differently in subspace, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always forward, depending on a lot of things: what kind of drives you have, what sort of gravity wells you pass, which way subspace is blowing, and–”
The doctor’s wife is confused. “Subspace blows?”
“Yes,” Helton explains, rearranging a few things on the table, removing items from the centerpiece, putting a carafe at one end and a bauble from the centerpiece near the other. “There are twenty-two dimensions, as you may have heard. Three in space that we can normally perceive, plus time. The physics are similar, but different, in the other dimensions, and by transitioning into them we can do things like going faster than light can here in our universe. But, just like space bends from gravity and solar winds blow here, things are neither smooth nor static in the other dimension. It’s kind of like wind. A little bit of wind and you can walk or fly normally and mostly ignore it. If there is a strong tailwind blowing, you get there faster; if you are bucking a strong headwind it takes longer, but the distance is the same. If a hurricane is passing through, then you can’t go anywhere–”
“Ah, the ‘Deep Black’,” Bipasha interjects.
“Yes, that is where the subspace is simply much too turbulent to transition into and fly.” The others look at him with expressions of interest or incomprehension.
“Pretend this,” he indicates the centerpiece on the table, “is an island. That,” pointing to the bauble, “is your ship, and that,” points to carafe, “is your destination. In a light tailwind blowing from you,” pointing to the Flight Engineer on the end, “the ship could sail down either side of the island at the same speed, but going back would be slower. But if a strong wind was blowing from you,” points to another, “at an angle across the island, then sailing on that side would be fast, but the other side would be slow and difficult because of all the wind eddies and swirls there. I
f a hurricane comes through, then no one sails anywhere, they just hide in the harbors and hope for the best.”
He puts the bauble in among the details of the centerpiece. “That is what happened when Eta Carinae blew. The Dark came in because subspace was not navigable. The local effects of the stars and planets swamped it close-in, so a-grav and accelacomps worked in-system, but not FTL. It sounds like right now we’ll be able to catch a wind that blows us, very quickly, past you,” he tosses the bauble to Bipasha, “then to you,” indicating she should toss it to Penger Trask, which she does, “then on to Niven,” represented by the Engineer. “Because we are going further in subspace, against a wind as it were, it’ll take longer ship time, but Niven hasn’t moved, so our real time hasn’t changed much.”
Lucretia, Trask’s wife, sounds dubious, “Okay, I guess that sort of makes sense.”
“Like I said, the details are complicated. If you are not interested in math and physics it’ll make your head hurt, but just remember time always goes forward, just at different rates depending on your path. Kind of like how time seems to go fast when you are having fun, and seems to drag when you are bored. Sometimes weird things happen, like being able to go a lot further and faster in universal time, but taking much longer ship time while using less fuel. Or more time on ship but less in universal time. Just imagine different weather and winds and currents and islands and mountains with the sailing ship, and it’ll be easier to visualize, even if it’s not entirely accurate.”
“One of the better descriptions I’ve heard,” Lag says.
“Thanks. I’ve had to explain it more than a few times.”
The Engineer looks at him closely. “Oh?”
“I’m a teacher. Between classes and a passel of nephews and nieces–”
A sudden burst of cheers and laughter from the far side of the room interrupts him, where a group of young men and women (mid-teens to early twenties) seems to be having a very good time. This is not the group’s first outburst. Several people glare at them, annoyed by the interruption.
The Doctor’s wife speaks disdainfully. “I wonder where the parents are? Children without manners should not be abandoned in public like that.”