Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  Jean sent her a message before she could get those basic things done or even unpack her very light single bag.

  “Can we talk privately?” he requested.

  “They took me to the very next room,” Kamala told him. “I’m not terribly concerned about propriety to have you visit my room midday. There are two doors connecting our rooms, with a gap and sound deadeners on the insides if you want to open yours.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll check that out right now,” Jean agreed.

  Jean already had his door open when Kamala opened hers.

  “This place is built like a fort,” Jean said. “Look how thick the walls are.”

  “How nice. It should be possible to sleep without your neighbor keeping you awake all night. I suspect the Derf have good hearing. They have ears like a fox.”

  “I’m more concerned the walls have ears,” Jean said.

  “You really think they would bother to bug us?” Kamala seemed dubious.

  “I always assume all foreigners are monitored in a foreign land.”

  “They have a restaurant if you want to go get a drink and maybe a snack. It’s a long time to breakfast local time and I’m hungry. Surely, they won’t bug all the public areas. The noise alone would make it difficult. Truth is I don’t think I have anything to say I couldn’t put on the public net,” Kamala said.

  “I’d still expect to be debriefed when I return home,” Jean said.

  Kamala started to say something and closed her mouth.

  “To the restaurant,” she insisted.

  She started to close the door but Jean blocked it with his foot. She took that as a very unfriendly action and took a half step back, not in fear but to give her room to set up a strike if he moved against her. She was smaller and knew her legs were much stronger weapons than her hands and arms. The way she turned slightly and braced off her back foot told Jean he was in trouble quickly if he didn’t explain.

  “I don’t want to exit your room with you and I don’t want to leave my connecting door open from my side. I’ll join you in the hall,” he promised.

  Kamala nodded agreement but didn’t drop her guard until his door was closed and she heard the bolt slide home. She did the same then and joined him in the corridor.

  Jean expected her to try to converse in the hallway or on the elevator down to the first floor. Instead, she was entirely silent and appeared to have dropped the guarded stance she displayed at the door. She walked closely beside him not trying to hang back at all.

  The greeter at the restaurant spoke to them in English. He got menus and headed for the favored window tables with a view. He was briefly surprised when Jean asked to be seated at one of the tables by the kitchen doors but altered course and sat them there.

  “You want the kitchen noise?” Kamala guessed.

  “That and these are always the less favored tables. If any are bugged, they are the least likely candidates. Unless they have them all bugged,” he added suspiciously.

  “You are a spy,” Kamala said not bothering to hide her irritation.

  “And you were doing those fancy steps back at your room getting ready to show me an Indian folk dance,” Jean accused.

  “I’d have tap-danced all over your pretty face,” Kamala assured him. “I saw you telegraphing a block. I can assure you we follow different disciplines. You would have been surprised as you fell because I targeted the knee opposite your expectations. But I’m not trained as an agent. I’m trained as a young girl who my mother wanted to be safe to go visit the market or deal with the spice seller for the household.”

  “Grew up in a rough neighborhood?” Jean asked.

  “I grew up in an area with three overlapping cultures, none of which respect women.”

  “I’m fully representing France’s commercial interests,” Jean insisted. “I’ll report back to the Minister and hopefully we’ll avoid the stagnation the North Americans will experience.”

  “After you report to your real boss,” Kamala insisted. “Not that I care. I have worked in the trade office my whole career, not a spook agency. If I’m debriefed by our intelligence people when we return it won’t surprise me. It has happened a couple of times in the past and they had questions that didn’t make any sense to me at all. It’s just our priorities are different.”

  “You and your intelligence debriefers or you and me?” Jean asked.

  “Yes,” Kamala said.

  Jean relaxed a little and laughed at her honesty.

  “If we leave it at that, then I see no reason we can’t each do our job and it will never really matter in what order we make our reports when we go back home.”

  “Agreed, as long as you don’t try to recruit me to do something stupid or jeopardize my mission by my being with you,” Kamala said. “Screw my side of it up and you’ll rue ever meeting me,” she promised.

  Jean looked amused and tried to laugh it off but she was humorless.

  The waiter shook his head no when Jean tried to order in French, then took their order easily in English. A corned beef sandwich on rye for him after soup and a plate of petite tenderloin morsels with scrambled eggs for her. They shared a pot of coffee that was surprisingly good.

  When the busboy came to clean up after them, he never noticed the steak knife she’d used was missing. There was a whole bin of them and nobody kept count.

  * * *

  Jeff and April sat down with Lee in her suite early. It was past breakfast but Lee had coffee and pastries for them. They had things to talk over before the Earthies joined them later. They should have enough time to get their systems on the same clock and not be lagged too badly. Sally from the bank would be arriving about the same time too. Other than discussing policy, Lee intended to hand them off to Sally for her to explain the nuts and bolts of the Exploration Society Protection Registry. That would include actual forms for them to take home and publish for explorers to be familiar with them and decide if they wished to use them.

  “Did you have any guests left last night?” Lee asked.

  “No, you called that. The serving carts were gone and Strangelove even got the extra seating removed. He told us what you said about tossing a blanket over any stragglers. It seemed to amuse him,” Jeff said.

  “I don’t think Derf are into private parties much,” Lee said. “But I’m given to understand they cut loose when they have big festivals with multiple clans together. He probably thinks we are pretty tame.”

  “I’ll take that as a challenge to shock him in the future,” April said.

  “Where is Strangelove?” Lee asked since he stayed so close to Jeff. I got him to promise Clarke to help us later after he did such a good job for you.”

  “He said he’s checking surveillance of the hotel after he made sure Jeff wasn’t going out. So, he must not be far,” April said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s giving the Earthies some special attention.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Lee said. “If we get a lot of Earth explorers using our registry, I might have to send a clerk to Central and have an office there where they can file claims and have a local net site that lists all the registered claims to aid developing them.”

  “That makes sense, Jeff agreed. “You should be happy to know I’ve decided I’m going to recommend to Heather that Central start using your registry to claim some of the systems and resources we are utilizing close to Human space,” April said. “Not our populated worlds but sources of mining and the systems most likely to be waypoints along routes from Earth to our worlds.”

  “That would be welcome. Would you explain what moved you to do that?” Lee asked.

  “This registry is a good thing. At the moment, we don’t need it terribly. But after examining your claims documents we saw that we don’t have to open a system up to anyone who wants to bid on using it. We can claim it and keep it closed off for our private use indefinitely. The fact there are claims in Central’s name alone will be supportive. It should encourage others to use the regi
stry. The filing fee isn’t that much compared to opening up a claim to development, but it’s still a little something to support your organization.”

  “It will help pay Sally and our rent. We have offices and a clerk to help her now. It sounds like you intend to register enough to be substantially helpful,” Lee said.

  “We’d like to help another way,” Jeff said. “Rather than direct your energies to produce jump drives I’d propose you let Central manufacture them for you. At least right now while you have other irons in the fire. You’d still have all the design details to make them yourself if you aren’t happy with our service. But our ships would share all the same drive dimensions, connectors, and mounting points. It should make things much simpler in the future to have one standard.

  “Heather has sufficient materials and fabricating capacity to make a little something on each one and still make them cheaper than you could starting from scratch. We need a lot of them so we’ll be gearing up for large volumes. Just replacing the jump drones we’ve lost is critical for us. We lost material it took us years to build up. In my estimation, the facilities at Central are more secure than a plant on Derfhome.”

  “The security aspect is a plus for both of us,” Lee agreed. “My guys have had to go to a lot of trouble to spread the work around to maintain security. Building our own plant is the only way we could do any serious volume. Other than, as you say, the little something you stand to make, what else is an advantage for Central?”

  “We were hoping you could spend the saved time and coin on improving the design of your reactionless drive. We’d love to see it ready to deploy in ships. I have a fellow in mind, Walter Houghton, who I think would be an asset to work with your researchers to improve that drive,” Jeff said. “I can probably persuade Heather to assign him here. When she hears about the new drive, I’m sure she’ll be very enthused. You wouldn’t even have to pay him. Heather already carries him on the payroll.”

  “It’s taking me some time to get everything ready to repossess Providence. I don’t think I want to wait until the Sharp Claws and Retribution can be refitted with new drives. That’s going to be expensive and a lot harder than my Kurofune. Why don’t we take the Kurofune to the Moon with my aircar grappled to my lock to show Heather? We can see if your man wants to come back and if Heather will let him go. With the new drive, it can be a day trip.”

  “You have the new mount ready this fast?” Jeff wondered.

  “No, but I can send the drive back up and leave it mounted in lunar orbit,” Lee said.

  “A ride in the Twool would go a long way towards recruiting Walter,” Jeff predicted. “You can haul it around by only the docking collar without damaging anything?”

  “Yes, Alonso was told to design that in at the start and he used the lightest advanced composites unless the prices were just ridiculous. That’s why the next version is going to be even better. The price of new advanced materials drops off month by month. In a year he’ll be able to make an equivalent airframe a couple of hundred kilograms lighter.”

  “If you don’t mind discussing it, what sort of power source are you using in the Twool?” Jeff asked. “I can’t believe the normal sort of commercial batteries would be sufficient and you didn’t ask us for a fusion generator or the sort of solid-state storage we use.”

  “New Japan has a fusion generator for sale now with much better energy density than a polywell reactor. They’re not cheap but they come in convenient sizes and no begging to buy them. I hate to depend on you for everything,” Lee said.

  That didn’t seem to upset Jeff at all.

  Strangelove returned and peeked in on them but retreated to the living room to do whatever he was up to.

  “What sort of tech is it? Do you have any specs on it?”

  “It’s a sintered metal shell with bucky tubes all over it in a high-pressure deuterium environment. It runs hot and the power is generated inside the core with thermo-electric modules. If you don’t let it idle using enough fuel to maintain temperature it takes a few minutes to heat up and come online,” Lee said.

  “Very nice,” Jeff said. “Several technologies had to independently mature enough to let them build that by bringing them all together. That’s pretty much how I make things but no one human has time to keep up with the literature in one field much less two or three. It makes it very difficult to develop cross-discipline advances.”

  “I thought you might be upset that it’s competition for your devices,” Lee said.

  “There’s no point in that,” Jeff said with a shrug. “We’ve guarded the details of our fusion generator to use it to our advantage. After I find out more about the New Japan unit, I may feel it opens the door to offering ours commercially on a wider basis. It comes up off a hard shutdown faster. That may be vital to some users. Having alternatives in the market may allow us to make some money off the design if there is no point in keeping it secret.

  “It’s always nice to make a little bit,” April agreed.

  “Do you use batteries to bring the unit up to operating temperature?” Jeff asked.

  “Yes, and it takes a good chunk of their capacity,” Lee said.

  “As our ally, I’d sell you some high-density storage large enough to allow you to lift off without delay and bring up the reactor at your leisure,” Jeff said. “It is still proprietary so you’d have to trust it as a black box. It will self-destruct if you try to take it apart. With this particular device, the problem would be to open it up without making it release the stored energy. It doesn’t take any elaborate booby-trapping at all. We’ve felt much freer to sell them in devices for just that reason.”

  “How much would this weigh?” Lee wondered.

  “Figure three or four kilograms for the whole thing, in a protective case with bus bar connections suitable to an aircar. It’s what we use in our pistols,” he said, patting his.

  “It must be pretty safe if you carry one around at your waist. The next generation aircar is going to be so light we’ll have to leave the pods pushing it into the pavement to keep it from blowing away,” Lee said.

  Jeff smiled at the slight exaggeration.

  The house announced Sally was downstairs and ready to come up. Lee told it to admit her to the elevator. Strangelove came in from the living room and took up his station against the wall behind Jeff since an outsider was coming in.

  “I’ll call and have my drive taken up to the Kurofune,” Lee said finalizing it before Sally arrived.

  “My man Clarke is observing in the kitchens and will come up with the food to fix drinks and serve us,” Strangelove told them. Lee hadn’t requested a second server for six people and Strangelove hadn’t suggested it.

  The last time Jeff and April saw Sally she was barely into her first Life Extension Therapy. She’d finished that and had had two follow-ups now. Instead of a woman in her early nineties, she looked like a very healthy forty-year-old.

  “Are you ready for a show and tell?” Lee asked her.

  “Yes, I have hard copies and attached data cards.” She frowned at Jeff and April, struck by a sudden thought. “Should I have brought copies for these two?”

  “Not at all,” Jeff assured her. “We’ve examined your material on the local net and were just telling Lee we’ll be registering claims.”

  “That’s good. We just got the first claim made remotely yesterday,” Sally said, directing this at Lee. “The relay drone came in from Fargone and had a package with all the data about the claim and the fee for the Fargone ship Magic Cat.”

  “The Fargoer’s can be as strange naming their ships as their children,” Lee said.

  “And yet I bet they don’t have a single little Hringhorni Jr. running around,” April said.

  “And one of them will take that bet because they are nuts that way too,” Lee predicted.

  The house computer announced the Earthies were waiting. Lee let them come up and told the hotel kitchen to serve them in a half-hour.

  The Indi
an woman, Kamala, stepped out of the elevator and started straight for them even before Lee waved her over. The far side of the suite where their table sat was across the longest open space in the suite. It ran along the diagonal from the inside corner with the elevator to the outside corner with the doors to the balcony. It was made that way on purpose to make the suite appear even larger than it was. The man, Jean, walked slower and looked around. If his face was any clue he was favorably surprised by the apartment. It was a full quarter of the top floor and much nicer than their second-floor rooms.

  Lee offered the hospitality of the bar and informed them there would be a bartender along soon if they wanted anything complex and called them to the table.

  Sally was at the foot of the table opposite Lee, and Jeff, and April sat on the long side away from the entry. That left two chairs open for the Earthies. Kamala in the lead grabbed the chair nearest Lee, opposite April, leaving Jean by Sally.

  It seemed odd to the Earth people not to have drinks elsewhere and then get called to the table but they went with local custom. They were very comfortable seats so it made sense not to stand around then move. Sally and April agreed to split a bottle of Champagne when Clarke could decant it. Lee opened a bottle of whiskey that was a gift from Jeff and several tried it. They spoke about that being a hobby of his for a bit. Nobody seemed in a hurry to get to business so they just made polite conversation and didn’t push it.

  After dinner was brought up and the hotel staff left, Clarke stayed to serve them. Lee offered for him to refresh their drinks if anyone needed that. Jean thought that was a lot to expect of one to serve six but Clarke did it fairly quickly. He took care of the ladies first. Jean wondered if that was an adopted Human custom or already the norm for a matriarchal society. They had three choices of soup, meat, and vegetable. Bread was put on the table in common, with rice and noodles. You’d have to be a very fussy eater or have religious restrictions not to find something.

  Kamala was having a side conversation with Lee and Jeff was leaning over having a private word with Sally. Jean asked the server, Clarke, where the washroom was, wondering if he’d understand that or if he’d have to be less delicate about it. The fellow understood perfectly and leaned over giving him quiet directions. It caught the attention of Kamala who looked away from Lee when the Derf leaned in to direct Jean.