Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “There is something you should make clear to your people. I intend to tell any Earthies that we won’t register worlds off the other side of Human space. I had some very good advice from several very smart people that would lead to unreasoning conflict. There’s no set line yet but, generally speaking, anything to the far side of a plane between us and Earth will be off-limits for our registry,” Lee said and drew an imaginary surface with her hand.

  “Half the heavens excluded. I have to think about everything that will do,” Kamala said.

  “We’re going to the Moon tomorrow. Do you want a fast ride back?” Lee asked.

  “Thank you, yes. That would be a kindness.”

  “Call Sally if you have any other questions,” Lee said. She walked her to the door.

  * * *

  “I’m going to the Moon for a day. Maybe parts of two days,” Lee told Musical and Born. “There is a technician there we intend to interview and bring back to work with you on improving the thruster if he’s willing.”

  “Will we be working for him or will he be working for us?” Born wondered. Musical looking at the screen over his shoulder looked concerned too.

  “How is it being done now?” Lee asked.

  “You never said either of us is the lead. We cooperate,” Born insisted.

  “Except Born is a bully who browbeats me into doing it his way,” Musical insisted.

  Lee ignored Musical being theatrical and Born rolling his eyes. If they needed to be silly now and then to stay sane, she understood it for what it was.

  “I’d have said you both work for me,” Lee said. “But if Born being a bully is why you are both turning out such marvelous work, why would I disrupt that?”

  “Sometimes he picks me up and carries me away,” Musical charged, enjoying playing the smart-aleck.

  Born made a yapping mouth with a true hand and worked it vigorously.

  “Have you considered biting him?” Lee asked.

  Musical’s eyes got big.

  “Would you?” he asked.

  “No, but I can fire him. I expect you to all work for me and behave like responsible adults among yourselves. If you genuinely can’t come to a consensus on a course of action, you may ask me. Be warned, however, I may decide by flipping a coin.”

  “We’ll manage,” Musical promised, and Born nodded agreement. Coin flipping seemed to be universal and didn’t have to be explained to either of the aliens.

  * * *

  “It’s rather well thought out and tasteful,” April said of the Kurofune control cabin, once Lee had clearance and they were away from Derfhome control.

  “It’s going to mess it up and make them put a well against the forward bulkhead under the ports to fit the drive in the nose and put a lock there. It’ll have to be longer too.”

  “Some things can’t be made pretty,” Jeff said. “Our acceleration canceling framework is ugly, and in the way frequently but I have yet to figure out how to make it less intrusive.”

  “Why bother now that you don’t need to make a long hard burn to be able to jump? If you offered it to me now, I’m not sure I’d want to install it,” Lee told him.

  Lee initiated the first jump and Kamala, who had never witnessed one from the control spaces, made a strange noise when a new star appeared.

  “It’s still an option,” April said. “I’m not ready to rip it out. Maybe we should offer it.”

  “It isn’t within the range of tech we agreed to share,” Lee said. “You had it even before your drive, right? I’m not hinting for a freebie.”

  Lee checked her numbers and jumped again.

  “I didn’t think you were. I’m changing my thinking. When we are all conveniently together with Heather, would you entertain the idea of expanding our cooperation to all important technologies? To thoroughly merge our proprietary horizons and culture?”

  “What brought this on?” Lee demanded. “I had the sense you might go the other way now that you had what you needed the most. Jeff seemed ready to cut us out of sharing your software, remember?”

  Lee checked her program for a match and jumped again.

  “That’s because he deals well with fields and particles but can be a flaming idiot with people,” April said. “He reconsidered because I was jumping up and down and silently mouthing no at him or he’d have thrown your trust away.”

  “It seemed like a perfectly reasonable point of order at the time,” Jeff said.

  “OK. You have the right of it, or he wouldn’t have tried to justify it again now,” Lee told April. “I suppose you are used to saving his bacon periodically?”

  “Heather and me both,” April assured her.

  “Hey, I’m trying to do right now, and you both are harping on old grievances,” Jeff said.

  “Fine, we will award you points for your present behavior, but answer this question. What moved you to offer such a thing now?” Lee demanded.

  “I’m looking forward. I try to do that a lot,” Jeff insisted. “You are going out among the stars using the same drive tech. We always hoped having distinctive drives would cause any aliens to see us as different than the Earthies. That’s not going to happen with you. It seems to me it is safer to see that you have all the same tools, both offensive and defensive, if you are indistinguishable from us. I’d hate for either of us to have a ship captured.”

  “This is not just theory,” April pointed out. “We have yet to meet a star-faring race that doesn’t go armed. Even your Badgers and Bills gave up going unarmed and were eager to buy weapons from us once they had the joy of meeting the Biters. There are some real bad actors out there.”

  “Does that mean you’ll reveal all about who you’ve met among the stars?” Lee asked.

  Jeff and April looked at each other. That still seemed to be difficult for them.

  “If Heather will buy the whole package,” Jeff said, “I am willing to support my sovereign and hold back no secrets. Realistically, now that you have similar materials you will produce equivalent mechanisms in short order. Likewise, you are eventually going to stumble on our worlds or meet the same actors we have out there. I have to admire the things your researchers have done. The advances are just as likely to come from them as us, and we’d both be stronger for being allies and sharing.”

  “I’m still back here,” Kamala reminded them from her seat. “Little old me, who Indian intelligence is almost certainly going to interrogate after I report to my trade boss. Though I don’t know if they’d believe this even if I’d recorded it for them. Do you really want them to know all this?

  “Why wouldn’t they believe?” Lee demanded.

  “How to say this?” Kamala sighed. “You sound more like my relatives squabbling with each other over a family dinner than political actors. None of you seem to have any clue how to speak in diplomatic language.”

  Everyone else traded looks.

  “I offended you,” Kamala decided belatedly.

  “No, no. We were just at a loss how to politely tell you we don’t care,” Jeff admitted. “You should tell them about the French fellow being replaced. I’m sure Heather will pass that along to the French but they could have just as easily replaced you.”

  “I’ll be sure to make that point,” Kamala promised. From the look on her face, she hadn’t considered she might have never made it to the Moon.

  “This is the last jump,” Lee said. “I’ll get us close to the Moon and you talk to traffic control and get our clearances. I’m sure they perk up and roll out the red carpet for Heather’s peers.”

  Two more jumps put them a few light seconds from the Moon on the good neighborhood side of its orbit.

  “I’ll probably know whoever is stuck on traffic duty by name,” Jeff said. “May I have the comm, pilot?”

  “It’s yours. The radio is on local control frequency.”

  “Central Control, this is Jeff Singh on the diplomatic courier Kurofune. May I have an orbit assigned and tentative clearance for my pilot to br
ing our ship’s auxiliary down on my Lady’s private field?”

  “Hi, Jeff. This is Boris. Sending suggested elements. When you are ready to drop call me from your shuttle and I’ll clear any of the great unwashed from your path to pad number two. You do want to drop to the hangar level?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We’re in mid-lunar with full sun and no breezes,” Boris joked. “So, no landing lights but only the one active automated approach beacon if you wish to do a hands-off landing. Has your pilot been here before?”

  “Yes, but not as a pilot I believe.”

  “Well, elevator two will have a tremendously big, framed number two on it that you can see from orbit and a standard, twenty-five-meter SpaceX target painted over it in the center for insurance purposes. Sending the LPS coordinates along with your orbital elements. Be safe, and if you can’t, try not to fall on anything historic or valuable.”

  “Thank you, Central Control, your care is appreciated. Please convey that we’d like a small repair bay so we can exit under pressure.”

  “You got it,” Boris agreed.

  “Yep, red carpet,” Lee said.

  “You are on the list to be expedited,” Jeff revealed.

  “I’ll test that sometime when you aren’t along,” Lee promised.

  “Is the radio still on local?” April asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Lee said after checking.

  “They didn’t say Armstrong copied,” April noticed.

  “I guess they dropped that courtesy after the Earthies tried to kill us,” Jeff said.

  “Not all the Earthies tried to kill you,” Kamala reminded them.

  “Noted,” Jeff agreed. It didn’t seem enough to make her happy.

  * * *

  The fact they were in just a tiny aircar made the eighty-meter square elevator seem even bigger. Kamala’s eyes got big and she was in awe when she realized the platform dropping them to the hangar was about the size of a soccer pitch.

  “Coming in the back door is much more impressive than riding over from Armstrong.”

  “I’d have mentally switched them from a resident’s perspective,” Jeff said. “I’ll see that you get a ride back to Armstrong. If you can’t get a lift back to LEO today, we keep a hospitality hotel room in Armstrong you can use.”

  “Twool, this is the facility manager, Ron Burk,” the radio announced. “I have a twenty-meter square repair and assembly room open. Once you are inside it will take about ten minutes to bring it up to full pressure. I’ll stop your platform in front of it. How may I safely transfer your vehicle? Do you need dollies under the pods I see or a big enough freight cart to hold the vessel entire? I need to know where there are safe lift points to get something under you. I’m thinking now I should have sent a freight cart for heavy machinery to the surface for you to land on. You appear to be an aircar to me so I have no idea how you are orbital-capable much less how to handle you properly.”

  “Mr. Burk, it would be much simpler if you just let me fly in,” Lee requested.

  That produced a long silence while he absorbed the idea.

  “The exhaust isn’t going to be damaging or the lingering gases a source of contamination in our pristine vacuum environment?” he worried.

  “It has no exhaust in the sense you mean. Just a very minor outgassing of helium from our fusion reactor,” Lee assured him. It simply hovers.”

  There was silence again probably because he didn’t want to call her a liar.

  “This is Jeff Singh, Ron. April and I can confirm what she is telling you.”

  “OK, this I have to see. Mind if I take a personal record off the video feed?”

  “Ron, Lee Anderson, the owner here. You may record but I’d be happy to give you a ride if you want later.”

  “Maybe, my people don’t hold much with hexing and magic,” Ron said.

  Everybody in the Twool cracked up laughing.

  “Sorry if I was offensive,” Ron said, confused.

  “Not at all,” Lee assured him. “It’s just I’ve been telling people it’s magic when they ask what makes it work and someone finally beat me to saying it.”

  “The lighted bay in front of you now is your destination if you want to, uh, move in.”

  “Thank you, Ron.”

  “If I may ask. Being an Anderson, are you related to the Sovereign?”

  “I have no idea,” Lee said. “It’s a common name and if we are distantly related neither of us has bothered to investigate the matter.”

  Lee set the control sensitivity way down for lunar gravity. It took some pretty firm stick to get the Twool to lift and move forward. With no view of the sky to read the LPS, she had no way to hover in place, so she sat it down on the deck but left the reactor idling.

  “You may close us up and pressurize if you will, sir,” Lee requested.

  “Yeah, OK, that is seriously spooky. I’ll have a cart in the corridor for you soon.”

  “See that our guest Kamala is dropped off and arrange transport to Armstrong for her too, please,” Jeff asked.

  The entry hatch slid down behind them. They couldn’t see any change outside. The walls were off-white and the lighting indirect. But as promised the external pressure stopped rising a bit short of ten minutes. Lee took it on faith it was breathable.

  * * *

  “I should have just told you to stay there because I’m going to want to see this with my own eyes,” Heather said.

  “It’s far too important a matter for us to play pranks on you,” Lee insisted.

  “That wasn’t my thought at all,” Heather said waving it away. “When this Derf fellow had it assembled, did you have him raise it on a video for you? Did you thank him and accept delivery from watching a video, or were you a little more enthused?”

  “I couldn’t wait to fly it,” Lee admitted.

  “There are a few things I’d like to run past you first if you don’t mind,” Jeff said “I’d like to call Walter Houghton in to see the Twool but he has no need to hear the policy ideas we’d like to discuss with you.”

  “You want to steal him,” Heather predicted.

  “Well yeah, but this needs to be upgraded and made into a ship’s drive as soon as we can. It’s worth sending Walter for a development period. You’ll get him back.”

  “OK, what is your proposal?” Heather asked.

  Jeff outlined his idea of full cooperation and sharing. April only chimed in a few times.

  “That’s a lot to absorb all at once,” Heather said.

  “But it is the direction we’ve been headed,” April said. “They’ve shared this drive with us when they could have played contract nitpickers and convinced themselves it was righteous to keep it.”

  “I’m not saying no,” Heather insisted. “Let me think on it and see what questions come to mind, that’s all. Do you intend to detail all the other devices built on special materials?”

  “That’s our thinking,” Jeff admitted. “We figure now that they have the special material, they will figure it all out without us.”

  “Let’s have lunch and call Walter to come see the Twool with us after,” April suggested.

  * * *

  Walter walked around it much as Jeff had on first seeing it. He even cautiously passed a hand between a pod and the deck. Lee had it hovering and got nervous when Walter pushed it towards a wall. He held on, however, and dragged it back to the center of the room before it got near bumping a wall.

  “I’d love to work on adapting the tech to ship suitable drives,” Houghton said.

  “Do I hear an unspoken BUT, hanging there on delay?” Jeff asked.

  “Yes, as intriguing as this is, I’m involved with… another project William Hardt and Martin Judd are working on.” He looked at Lee, uncertain he could speak freely about it with her there.

  “And that quickly, my nose is rubbed in the fact it’s hard for us to cooperate in neat little compartmented projects,” Heather said.

  “Not at all,”
April denied in a snarky voice. “You simply need a vast security apparatus bigger than your actual research staff to place three or four handlers between the actual people doing the work to police their expressions. If that slows things down, you have to balance which is more important, advancing the project, or making sure nothing of any value leaks beyond your information containers.”

  That was so bluntly put to their sovereign even Walter was taken aback.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to speak up,” Heather said, fixing Lee with a hard stare.

  “Your people came up with this idea of merging far closer. It seems fine to me, but if I have to sell it to you, I don’t need it. If that doesn’t tell you we’re equal partners, we’ll muddle along on our own,” Lee said pointing at the aircar silently floating there.

  Walter looked like he wanted to be anywhere but trapped with all these people way above his pay grade hammering out a hard policy with zero tact or delicacy. He just kept quiet and hoped nobody demanded he express an opinion. Not that he didn’t have one. He felt pretty much like April. But even she had been too polite to call that sort of centralized secrecy Earth Think. He wasn’t eloquent enough to find a milder euphemism for it.

  Heather did not look happy, but she took a deep breath and her voice and entire manner changed.

  “We are disposed to accept your unanimous advice and expand the cooperation between the Exploration Fleet and Registration Society, represented in the person of Lee Anderson and the Red Tree clan for whom she is a Voice, with our own researchers already having a thorough record of the Little Fleet from their Claims Commission record We will open Our archives. We shall retreat to my quarters again to discuss this before you head back to Derfhome. We can’t think clearly gazing upon this freaky floating-thing-wondering what holds it up.”

  She led the way out to their carts.

  Lee hurried to drop the Twool on the deck, unwilling to leave it floating there and rushed to join them. They didn’t talk on the way back but everyone was thinking furiously When they got back, Heather poured herself a stiff drink, which wasn’t her habit at all.

  “Go ahead and let’s hear your misgivings or limitations,” Heather told Walter.