Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  Shion, though, was just so down to earth, with her short-cropped hair and shipboard rig overalls, that they’d gradually got over that embarrassment, moving to being able to think of her as just another officer.

  And then there’d been the banquet at Camae, hosted by Camae’s ruling prince. He was the system president, as the Camag had been voting their royalty into presidential offices for centuries and they certainly weren’t inclined to stop doing so now. Shion had agreed to attend the dinner in her chamlorn’s robes as a courtesy from one royal house to another. And for the first time, the Samartians had seen her in that regal attire, gliding like a swan, maintaining perfect poise. You had to, as she’d explained, beforehand, because the seventeen ritually significant pieces of cloth which made up a chamlorn’s robes were draped about her with no fastenings of any kind, so any rushed or ungainly move would see the lot come sliding right off.

  Alex had seen the looks the Samartians had been giving her during that dinner, particularly Jarlner, and had resigned himself to having to have another chat with them about treating Shion as a shipmate and if necessary, introducing another awe-buster like the monkeys. Shion herself, though, had handled that as soon as they got back aboard, shedding both her dignity and her robes with a frantic scratch at an itchy buttock which she claimed had been driving her nuts the whole evening.

  ‘Well – no,’ Bennet conceded, with a little laugh, then, at the nonsensical suggestion that she could see Shion as a goddess… not now, anyway. ‘But…’

  ‘Lady Ursele is Shion’s aunt.’ Alex said. ‘Also, it appears, her half-sister – relationships can obviously be a bit tangled in a society with so very few men – but she is, in fact, her aunt. You are mates with Shion. Lady Ursele is her aunt. You can’t be mates with someone and worship their aunt, it’s ridiculous. And if it isn’t disrespectful to say that Shion isn’t a goddess, why would it be any more so to say that of Lady Ursele?’

  ‘You’re right… yes, of course, you’re right,’ Jarlner admitted. ‘And it’s not that we worship her, of course we don’t.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Alex. ‘You just can’t look at her or speak to her and you speak her name with utter reverence and won’t allow her image to be taken in vain…’

  ‘You,’ said Bennet, with a wide grin, ‘can be really infuriating, Alex. Smug. That’s the look. Smug.’

  ‘Just doing my bit for inter-species diplomacy,’ Alex said and laughed as the Samartians told him what they thought about that.

  All the same, Bennet asked the next day if she might visit the chamlorn again and when the request was granted, went there with a light of purpose in her eyes. And this time she did speak, though with extreme and military reserve, emerging from the event with dignity restored. And if the words Absolutely Not A Goddess flashed across her mind’s eye at moments when she was feeling in some danger of being overwhelmed, she certainly would not give Alex the satisfaction of telling him that.

  Seventeen

  Three weeks later, they ran into the biggest ridge they would encounter in the whole of the Van Damek. It was actually three ridges, rising in size and intensity.

  ‘I believe it will take at least three days to get round, Skip,’ Lionard told Eldovan, who’d come to take the conn when the ship came to standby alert. ‘And maybe an hour to get through.’

  Eldovan looked at the ridge profile, considering. A ridge was an area of wave space whether either an increased density in matter or higher energy levels created rough conditions. In this case it was a combination of both, a band of energised particles which analysis was showing as the still-spreading blast wave from a long-dead supernova. Long range scans could even detect the further two spreading particle-clouds, with the inner one considerably bigger and more energetic. The supernova, evidently, had popped off a couple of preparatory explosions before going for the big one.

  It was right on the edge, a skipper’s decision whether to play it safe and go around or take the rough ride and risk some scratches to the paintwork. But they had more here to consider than their own comfort.

  ‘Shion,’ Eldovan called her directly. ‘We have a judder-ridge for an hour or a three day diversion. Can you find out for us which her grace would prefer?’

  ‘I don’t need to, Skip.’ Shion sounded amused. ‘Her grace knows how much joy we have in this kind of thing and would not dream of depriving us of that fulfilment. I’ll advise her that there will be some vibration for an hour or so.’

  It would, indeed, have broken Lionard’s heart not to be allowed to cross the most exciting feature they’d encounter on the route. And, as it turned out, would have had Kate howling with frustration too. She had got her experimental mix-cores humming together and she really needed to see how they would respond to turbulence like this.

  Anyway, they rode the ridge. It was something nearly all of them enjoyed, other than for a few of the Second’s people up on the interdeck who turned a little green around the gills or were hanging on to furniture as they walked. The juddering was not actually that violent, as starship vibration could get a lot worse than that. But it was unpredictable, with odd moments when the ship felt absolutely still and then would twitch and shudder like a shying horse.

  ‘Sorr-eee,’ Lionard sang out, grinning all over his face, as a particularly weird twist in the ridge rolled the ship over to starboard and the helm had to fire thrusters to compensate.

  He had said that three times before they were clear of it, leading to the feature being dubbed Sorry-Ha-Ha Ridge. But that, of course, was only its informal name. Officially and for as long as the League kept starcharts, this feature would be Lionard’s Ridge, in keeping with the tradition of naming ridges after the navigator who took the first ship through. And there would be a story told about it, too, for as long as spacers passed this way and told one another why it was called the Sorry-Ha-Ha. The retold version would be that the manic Lionard had rocked and rolled the ship right through it shouting ‘Sorrreee!’ and laughing his head off, but there was a kernel of truth to that, after all.

  Once through the ridge, though, it was Kate who was shouting and laughing her head off. Engineering had been very busy during the ridge transit, calibrating cores which were throwing themselves out of phase faster and more violently than the auto-compensation systems could cope with. Again and again, manual override was required, with techs moving rapidly amongst the cores.

  But under her gantry, Kate had just sat and watched, hands free, as her cores calibrated themselves. The experimental pair were surrounded with just the same control tech as the rest of the eighty two cores throughout the three engineering sections. And that control tech was set to take over if the experimental calibration so much as hinted at a wobble. Always before in this kind of space, the self-calibrators had failed, skewing wildly and needing the safety systems to kick in. After the last time, Kate had been confident that she understood why that had happened and that she could fix it.

  And she had been right. The experimental self-calibrating cores had gone through the entire ridge not only coping with the turbulence but anticipating it. These engines were so in tune that they had read ahead of where they were and already been adjusting to the new wave-space conditions, nanosecond to nanosecond. The result that was while every other core in engineering had been buzzing, running hot, running cold, slipping toward dephase in twenty directions at once, Kate’s cores had purred right through in perfect, unruffled harmony.

  She gave one great shout, as the ship stood down from traversing the ridge. ‘Yes!’ And the next minute, she was dancing around on the gantry, doing what she later described as the Dance of the Happy Cores. It was certainly the dance of an ecstatic engineer and when the rest of the engineering team saw the results on her control board they were yelling and jumping about with delight, too.

  The joyous news rushed through the ship with all the excitement of the birth of a child. Kate’s cores had worked.

  It was still a very long way from having them
replace the standard core control systems, of course. There would be years of further testing and field trials before the Fleet would even consider that. But they all knew what a milestone this was on that journey and what potential it had for the future. All the same they wanted to hear about it from Kate herself. So Mako, picking up on that vibe, asked her if she’d do a hotseat. This had been a popular event during the first three months of the ship’s commissioning, though rather laid aside after their visit to Cestus. Now, though, Mako recognised demand and so arranged a hotseat in the Promenade one evening.

  This was a very simple event, really. The Promenade was set up in the same style a liner might use for a cabaret, tiny tables and chairs on gently tiered levels, with the focus a small stage on which there was a chair and side-table.

  This was not a lecture, nothing like so structured even as a talk. The format was that of a chat show, responding to questions from the audience, though Mako had resisted the temptation to put a chat-show style backdrop on the stage or any gimmicky flame-effects on the hotseat itself. Spacers were just about willing to tolerate the liner-style venue, but there were limits.

  So Kate sat down in the hotseat with a bottle of water beside her and Mako himself, as host, picked out people who wanted to ask her questions. He also, to Kate’s own amusement, had a whistle with which he could halt her answers if she got carried away and was turning it into a lecture after all.

  One of the first questions was asked by one of the chamlorn’s attendants, a handful of them having come to the event. The question came from Narul, the solitary man in the group and ordinarily one of the quietest.

  ‘What do people mean,’ he queried, ‘when they say that these cores will revolutionise starships?’

  ‘Oh,’ Kate grinned modestly. ‘We’re a long, long way from that,’ she said. ‘And a whole lot of people will have worked on them before they’re ready even to trial on other ships. It will be at least a decade, for sure, before they’re ready to try them even on unmanned, remotely operated trial ships and decades more before they’re the standard being used on new-build ships. But the potential is there – if they work as I believe they will, the potential is there for ships to travel a lot faster than they can right now, particularly in space where the environment dictates the speed. Like, on the route to Carrearranis. Right now, even the fastest ships have to crawl through that route because of all the turbulence and vortices, whirlpools. With the new cores, ships could just power right through it, with the journey very much quicker – and safer.’

  ‘And the self-launch,’ A voice prompted from an upper tier and Kate grinned again.

  ‘Purely theoretical, at this stage!’ she said and addressed Narul. ‘Right now, any ship bigger than the size of a bus has to have its engines boosted by tunnels to be able to launch and decelerate, which means that if a ship falls sublight out in space it crashes, uncontrollable descent, the ship is completely destroyed. If the theoretical potential of these cores is realised, then it may be possible even for ships of this size to launch themselves anywhere and decelerate themselves safely, too, in an emergency. And, ultimately, long long term, we wouldn’t need to be building expensive and dangerous launch tunnel infrastructure in our systems. All theoretical and will be for a long time. But that’s what so exciting about the potential of these cores, Narul, that it will make superlight travel safer and easier, not just faster.’

  Narul thanked her with a smile. And the following week, to general delight, it was Narul himself sitting up in the hotseat.

  He had volunteered. He, the quietest of all the attendants, only ever coming onto the interdeck as part of a group and always the one listening in conversations, rarely saying anything. He had recognised, though, that the Venturi’s people had a whole lot of questions they wanted to ask, but didn’t like to, so had offered to take a hotseat session if Mako felt that people might be interested.

  The Promenade was packed, even standing room at the back full to capacity. And most of the people who couldn’t get in were watching it live on holoscreens.

  Alex was one of them, sitting in his quarters with his feet up, officially on down-time and watching purely, as he would swear to Simon, for personal interest. Simon had had words with him that day, having detected Alex reading work files in his private quarters. Down time, Simon had insisted, must be down time and his private quarters a space in which he did not work.

  So Alex was emphatically not working as he settled on the sofa which would flip over at night into a bunk. Rather like the Samartians, he had opted for a smaller living space than his rank entitled him to, a cabin fitted out to his own ideas of what was comfortable. So there was the sofa-bunk with a low coffee table in front of it which could slide away when not in use. The rest of the space was occupied by a four-seater dining table, currently tucked away into the corner. There was only one artwork here, too, the painting which Migan had given him as a parting gift. The wall facing him was full holoscreen, giving the impression that he was watching the hotseat from an upper level of the Promenade.

  And he was, too, really interested, keen to hear about life on Pirrell from the male point of view.

  Narul didn’t disappoint, either. One of the first questions he was asked was how many children he had, at which he looked frankly bewildered.

  ‘How would I know?’ he queried and as the laughter and amazement calmed down, Mako prompted him to explain. ‘Procreation is an entirely separate thing from being in relationships. I would not expect that women who are in loving, partner relationships with me would choose me as the father when they chose to have a child. My DNA is good, yes, but I am not so arrogant as to think that it is the best that any woman could want – what you would say, I think,’ he grinned, ‘God’s gift to women! Besides,’ he went on, when there was more laughter, ‘genetic match is advised by procreation experts, maintaining genetic diversity in our population and preventing genetic disorders arising from incompatible DNA.’

  ‘So, you only get to have a baby if the doctors say you can? And with the father they choose?’ One of the women in the audience sounded as if she was getting ready to be outraged, but Narul just laughed.

  ‘No, you may have children any time you like,’ he said. ‘The procreator guides will advise and offer a range of choices to a woman making a planned pregnancy. Most people do plan their pregnancy like that, as the socially responsible thing to do – as, I know, it is the custom on most of your worlds for people to consult doctors and fertility experts when deciding to have a child. But if you choose to take the risk of genetic defects, you may procreate the old fashioned way and let the dice of nature roll.’

  ‘But, you really don’t know how many children you have fathered?’

  ‘No, why would I?’ Narul looked perplexed again. ‘I have never had a child directly with a woman. In my family that would be considered… what’s the word? Yes. Vulgar.’ He smiled. ‘My family is quite prim and proper, proud of our genetic heritage. So like most men, I donated my genetic material during my twenties, when it was at its prime. Such material is shared across the planet to avoid gene-narrowing clusters. I am not told and I wouldn’t ask how many women have chosen my DNA. That would be weird.’

  ‘So – is your DNA anonymous, then?’

  ‘No, why would it be?’ Narul said. ‘My information is on it, but it isn’t important. Women are looking for the best match for a strong and healthy child, not a relationship. The child is theirs, always, theirs, nothing to do with me. The only involvement we have, in your terms, as parents, is when a boy is growing up, a few men will undertake care and guidance, role-models. I have done that, myself, forming strong and loving bonds with a male child. But whether they’re my child genetically, who cares? It’s irrelevant.’

  The questions moved on, then, to Narul himself, about his childhood and his family.

  ‘I grew up at court, mostly,’ he said. ‘My family has been in the service of the chamlorn for eighteen generations, my mother was in attendan
ce and once I was old enough to run around with the other children, she went back to work. You have to realise that we don’t raise our children as you do. We are brought up communally, cared for by every adult around us and in your terms, we run wild. There are no schools, no structure, childhood is a time for running and playing, exploring, discovering. As children grow, they naturally start to ask questions and finding what interests them, follow adults about, asking them things, wanting to learn and to copy what they do. At some point, generally, we find we need skills in order to pursue our interests and it is then we begin to learn in a more focussed way, with teachers and books. But it is not the way you do it – the student, with us, is always the one in control, the student chooses what to learn and when to learn it and the teacher is there to support, not direct. And it can, believe me, be quite annoying when a child has decided they want you to teach them and they keep turning up with a thousand questions just when you’ve got something else you were wanting to do. There was a girl once who followed me around for three years and I don’t think she let me have one day without her turning up with ‘Narul, why…’’

  There was some laughter at that, particularly amongst those who had children of their own.

  ‘But we do it, of course,’ Narul shrugged, laughing himself. ‘Refusing to teach or give time to a child would be as awful, to us, as shoving them out of the way. And when they are getting on our nerves, we remind ourselves that we too were once that child bobbing up in the middle of meals or intimate times with partners and asking why and how and when and who and what… and I was that child, too, following an attendant around, asking about and copying everything she did.’

  ‘So – were you always destined to become an attendant?’

  ‘Destined?’ Arul looked at Mako for clarification and Mako smiled.

  ‘Was it decided while you were still a child, because of your family’s long history of attendance?’