Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  After a minute the airlock opened and a man stepped out. He was tall, taller than anyone in the camp, and had sandy blond hair. He was wearing the black and silver pants and jacket of a Fleet officer and a small airmask that only covered his mouth and nose.

  She heard her father say something in a language she didn’t recognize. No, wait, she did—it was Earthlang, spoken by a human rather than a computer. He had said, “Welcome to Garamond.” She listened closely and tried to keep her breathing quiet.

  The man looked around, turned back to her father. “I’m Lieutenant Claus Wiesen. I’m—”

  “You are a Pilot in the TSARINA Fleet,” her father said calmly. “Your ship is a Quantum Dynamics Light Fighter, or a similar model, and has a standard crew compartment of two. Where is your co-pilot?”

  “You know your ships,” the man said. “Are you in charge around here?”

  “I am the Colonial Magistrate of the Garamond mining colony. My name is Shi Po. Your ship has weapons damage. Why are you here?”

  “Was it raiders?” Jin asked. The stranger jumped. Her father turned to look at the Rescue ship’s cockpit, sighed.

  “That was my—assistant, on board our ship,” he explained. “I apologize for not telling you, but regulations require that communications with unauthorized visitors be monitored.”

  “Sure—sure, I understand. Listen, could I come onto your ship? Something out here’s burning my eyes.”

  Her father nodded. “That would be the atmosphere. There is an eyewash kit in the Rescue ship.”

  “Great.” The pilot began to step forward, but Jin’s father didn’t move out of his way. Instead he leaned forward and said something to the pilot, too quietly for Jin to hear; a moment later the pilot passed something to her father, but the way they were standing she couldn’t see what it was.

  “Jin, please unseal the outer airlock door,” her father said.

  She keyed the ‘lock open and watched her father lead the stranger in by the hand. Wiesen was covering his eyes with his hand, rubbing them. She heard the two men climb into the ship and the airlock hiss closed.

  Her father’s voice came from the corridor outside. “You should rest in here, Lieutenant Wiesen. I will return soon with the eyewash.”

  Jin looked up as her father stepped into the cockpit, hoping that everything would be explained to her. Instead he simply nodded and retrieved the First Aid kit from the closet. He then turned to her and held out a shiny black object. “Take this and keep it safe,” he said.

  “What is this?” she asked. It was smaller than a datapad, and surprisingly heavy in her hand.

  “It is a pistol, Lieutenant Wiesen’s. No weapons are permitted within the dome, Fleet Pilots not excepted.” Jin put the pistol in the kitbox under her console. Her father returned to the corridor. “Please monitor the instruments,” he said as he left. “I will be occupied tending to Lieutenant Wiesen.”

  She knew she ought to stay at her console, but she couldn’t resist tiptoeing out to the corridor to try to listen to him talking to the Fleet Pilot. The door was closed, and with her imperfect mastery of Earthlang Jin couldn’t make out what they were saying. Increasingly long periods of silence followed each of her father’s questions. After while their voices became quieter, so that she could not hear them at all, and she went back to sit in the cockpit. It was just as well. This way, there was no chance of her father catching her listening. She’d made enough mistakes already.

  On impulse, she opened up the kitbox and drew out the pistol, which was smaller and somehow less dangerous-looking than the ones in the vids, more like a tool than a weapon. It was really a dull, dark grey, not black, and the stock had a hammered finish that made it cling to her fingers. On the power cell cover were stamped the characters wu shen, Wiesen’s name in Earthlang Formal; it was his maker’s mark, to show that he had made it himself. She had just put it back in the kitbox when her father returned, leading Lieutenant Wiesen into the cockpit.

  “Lieutenant Wiesen, this is my daughter, Shi Jin. She is studying Earthlang to prepare for her duties as Junior Magistrate.”

  Close up, Jin could see that Wiesen’s blond hair was thinning and his beefy face flushed. His eyes were red—probably from exposure to the atmosphere, she thought. His black and silver uniform failed to hide the paunch around his middle.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Wiesen said, very slowly. He gave her the quarter-bow reserved for children.

  Jin gave him the full bow of a subordinate to a superior, rather than a child’s bow to an adult. “I understand Earthlang,” she said.

  “Jin,” her father said warningly, but Wiesen seemed not to take offense.

  “Well, good—that’ll make my job a lot easier.”

  “Lieutenant Wiesen will be teaching you Earthlang while he’s here,” her father said. “This will take the place of your regular lessons for the time being.”

  “How long will he be here?” Jin asked.

  “Ask Lieutenant Wiesen your question, Shi Jin,” her father said. “In Earthlang.”

  “How long will you be staying with us, zi Wiesen?” Jin asked the man, slowly and carefully.

  “That depends—a few months, at least. But we’ll have fun, eh?”

  “Isn’t someone coming to rescue you?” she asked.

  “No—the Fleet is very busy right now, and they don’t have time to rescue people who aren’t in danger. You people rescued me, and that’ll have to do.”

  “We get Travellers, once a year,” Jin said. “They bring vid chips and things. They could probably get you back to the Fleet.”

  “Fleet Pilots are not permitted to use unauthorized transport,” her father said. He turned to the other man. “This make of ship is normally stocked with a store of high-density food supplies. I do not believe the Fleet will object if you share them with our community.”

  “Of course,” Wiesen said. “You’re welcome to everything I have.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be teaching me Earthlang.” Jin said as she watched Wiesen lay out the makeshift pieces on the board of alternating black and white squares.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re learning Earthlang. Now, you’re black, so you go first.”

  She looked the board over sceptically. “Which piece should I start with?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  Jin thought for a second and then took one of the bottom-rank pieces—pawns, they were called—and pushed it forward. “Was that right?” she asked.

  “We’ll have to see.”

  “I thought you knew how to play this game.”

  “I do. And part of the game is that the right thing to do changes as the game goes on.” Wiesen pushed one of his own pawns forward, two spaces.

  “I thought they only moved one space at a time.”

  “Except for the first time they move, when they can go two spaces—I told you that. You have to know the pieces at your command, what they can do.”

  “So now what do I do?”

  “Move another piece.”

  Jin narrowed her eyes, tried to believe that these bolts, washers and other bits of scrap that had been painted white and black were a game. She knew what a game was: it was like a vid where you controlled what happened—but there was always a right and a wrong choice, one that would lead you to the reward at the end and one that would get you killed. “Why are you teaching me this?” she asked.

  “Your father asked me to.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’d learn how to play games.”

  “Everyone knows how to play games.”

  “You don’t know how to play this one.”

  Sighing, Jin moved her pawn another space. She tried to guess what her opponent would do next, like she’d been told to. She guessed right: Wiesen moved another pawn.

  “Thi
s is boring,” Jin said, pushing her pawn forward.

  “What would you rather do?”

  Jin looked up from the board. “Tell me about being a Fleet Pilot. What kind of battle were you in? Why did you come in so fast? Why did my father have to turn off all the computers before you got here?”

  “I’ll tell you what—let’s keep playing the game, to make your dad happy, and every time you take one of my pieces I’ll answer one question. Okay?”

  Jin considered it. “Okay,” she said. That was her favourite new word, a bit of Earthlang the computer hadn’t taught her—it was from the Informal mode, what people in the Core Worlds actually spoke. With an incentive, she found it easier to imagine different possible moves the way Wiesen had said she should. Even still, she had lost four pieces before she managed to take one of his pawns.

  “Can I ask a question now?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What kind of battle were you in?”

  “A space battle.” Wiesen paused, watching the look of betrayal that spread across her face. “I’ll give you that one for free. Next time, remember: if you don’t aim, you won’t hit anything.”

  Jin threw him an annoyed look. “You sound like my father.”

  “I hope so. To answer the question you should have asked, it was a battle with rebels—probably the last one, for awhile. I’m pretty sure that’s why your food ship’s been late. The rebellion started at Jericho—that’s a Fleet base, not too far from here—and this area’s been pretty hot since then.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about that.”

  “The Fleet doesn’t like to talk about rebellions until they’re over. Anyway, the Magistracy poured just about everything it had—Nospace fleet, Reserve fleet, even orbital defence ships—into blowing the rebels out of All-the-Stars. In the end they pretty much succeeded.”

  “Then why did you come here?”

  “That’ll cost another piece.”

  Two more of her own pieces gone and she was able to take one of Wiesen’s knights. “Why did you have to come here—so quickly?” she asked.

  “Better question. More precise.” Wiesen sat back in his chair, paused. “I was being chased, by a much bigger ship. A fighter can go to Nospace more quickly than a larger ship—less mass—but since larger ships have more fuel, they’d have caught up with me while I was slowing down. So I didn’t—I decelerated just enough to get back into real space, then shot for your planet and hoped its gravity and atmosphere would slow me down before my ship burned up.” He stopped, reliving a memory, then smiled slightly and went on. “And since that was such a good question, I’ll answer your next one for free: your father turned off the computers because he guessed what I was doing, and knew it would create a magnetic shock that would damage them.”

  “Is that the procedure, for when someone does that? My father would have looked it up in the Regulations Guide.” And he wouldn’t think much of this game, where right and wrong keep changing, Jin thought.

  “There is no Regulations Guide for what I did. So far as I know, nobody’s ever done it before. And with good reason; it was a stupid thing to do—”

  “But it was the right thing to do?”

  “Right. Or it looks that way, at this stage of the game. Speaking of which—” he shifted one of his bishops along its diagonal path “—that’s check, mate in two moves.”

  Jin looked over the board. She hadn’t noticed her king was in danger at all. “What do you mean? We haven’t played those moves yet.”

  “No, but there’s only a few ways for them to go, and they all end with your king being trapped. I can play them out for you if you like.”

  He slid the pieces around the board, playing both black and white, to show how it would go: each time she said she wouldn’t have made the move he said she would he showed her how she had trapped herself, cutting off her options with the choices she had made.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I distracted you. So long as you wanted to take pieces so I’d answer questions, I knew you wouldn’t pay much attention to protecting your king. It doesn’t matter how many pieces you take, if you’re playing for the wrong goal. Want to play another game?”

  “But you’re better than me at it,” she said, furious at being tricked.

  “I’m also bigger than you. Are you going to let that get in your way?”

  “What can I do about it?”

  “You’ve already learned the principles. The rest is just a matter of improving your technique.” Wiesen cleared the board, starting putting the pieces back in their original positions. “Again?”

  Jin trained sealant spray along the bottom of the Rescue ship, shielding her eyes with her free hand, and then blew along the line to keep it from stippling as it dried. It had taken her all day to do her regular maintenance, instead of the few golden hours it usually did: her father had done a check after they had returned from retrieving Wiesen but had left it to her to return the ship to its formerly pristine condition. It was a good thing he had allowed her to skip her Earthlang and Calligraphy lessons while Wiesen was there, or there wouldn’t have been enough blue hours in a day.

  It was certainly true that her Earthlang was improving—she knew almost all the Formal words now, a lot of Informal, and they were starting to work on her accent—though she couldn’t say the same for her calligraphy. What she had seen of Wiesen’s was laughably bad, though out of politeness she refrained from pointing it out. She was also under orders from her father not to say anything about his table manners; Fleet Pilots didn’t use sticks because they didn’t work well in zero-gee. It was strange, because he was fanatically tidy in everything else—another Fleet habit, born of the need to keep a close eye on your possessions without gravity to hold them down.

  Still, it was his game that fascinated her. She’d won her first game with him a week and a half after they’d started. When she did, he told her he was glad he didn’t have to handicap himself anymore, and she hadn’t won again since.

  The game occupied most of her mind these days. It was a good thing: even rationed carefully, Lieutenant Wiesen’s supplies were already starting to run out. Like her, the miners who had seen Wiesen’s ship arriving had hoped it would be the food ship, and her father’s refusal to tell anyone what it had been was not reducing the tension in the camp.

  Clearing her mind, she closed her toolbox and gave the Rescue ship a final once-over. The Travellers had made orbit two nights before, and she wondered if she would have time to watch any of the new vid chips they had brought. She ran a finger along the seal and then began to crab-walk out from under the ship.

  She paused at the sound of footsteps in the hall. From her vantage point she could only see the feet of the person coming into the room, but the unweathered black boots told her immediately who it was.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Wiesen,” she said, coming out from under the ship in a crouch. She straightened up, brushed her hair back from her face and gave the appropriate bow.

  He gave a small head nod, then returned her bow a moment later. “Yes. Hello.” He turned slightly, looking around the room and behind him. Other than his boots, he was not wearing his uniform but rather plain coveralls. “Were you working on the ship?”

  She nodded.

  “Everything fine?”

  “No problems.” She frowned, glanced over at the ship. “Are you here to review my work?”

  “No. Just passing by.” He turned to face her. “Do you want a game?”

  She nodded, followed him back to his room.

  He sat at the table and began to lay out the pieces on the board. “What shall we play for?”

  “Tell me more about the Travellers,” she said.

  “Oh, I see,” Wiesen said, taking on a dramatic tone. “Do you want to know why it is that they can never make planetfall? Why they’re condemned to wander the stars forever?”

  J
in shook her head; every child in All-the-Stars knew that story. She ran a finger along the tops of her pawns before sliding one two spaces ahead. “Every year they bring vids and other things like that, but all they ever take from us is old parts and machines we don’t need any more—even stuff that’s broken. What good does it do them?”

  “Travellers don’t have a word for broken,” Wiesen said. “I mean, I’m sure they do, but they don’t ever use it. Only using something for what it was designed for would be admitting that the person who made it is smarter than they are, and so far as they’re concerned no landsider is smarter than a Traveller. I’ve actually learned a few Traveller tricks over the years: most Pilots have—ways to use parts from your secondary systems to keep your ship going when it’s damaged, things like that.”

  “So why don’t they have to follow the rules? Nobody else just gets to go wherever they want—or grow their own food.”

  “If you ever tasted Traveller food, you wouldn’t envy them too much: it’s mostly just nutrient algae.” He moved his queen’s knight out ahead of his pawns, daring her to go after it. “But to answer your question, they don’t follow the rules because the Magistracy doesn’t make them. They’re like a safety valve: the vids and trinkets they sell distract people. Plus the Magistracy makes most of the vids anyway, and letting Travellers sell them is the best way of spreading their propaganda.”

  She slid another pawn forward, pointedly ignoring his provocation. “But why can’t they sell food?” she asked. “Even if it was just a little, it would help out when the ships were late.”

  “Which is exactly why they can’t. So far as the Magistracy is concerned, it’s actually better if the ships are late now and then—it reminds everyone how dependent they are on everything running smoothly.” He moved his knight again, to a space near the middle of the board.

  Jin frowned, held her hand over her pieces for a moment and then slowly moved another pawn forward. She was trying to understand what it was that Wiesen was trying to get her to do, but so far she couldn’t see it. “But the Travellers, if they sold food when the ships were late they could get anything they wanted for it.”