Back | Next
Contents

Shipwright

Donald Kingsbury

I am an arrogant man, he thought. It was arrogance that brought me out to the Frontier and arrogance that has given me this ironic reward.

Throughout the Akiran System, from the mines of inmost Sutemi to the cold wastes of outer Kiromasho, farmers and merchants and craftsmen and lords were celebrating with fireworks and dancing. Now the Akirani could forge an empire out here in the Noir Gulf within this thin wisp of stars that pointed Solward. They had their own shipyard. They had their first home-built starship, the Massaki Maru, the First One, the Leader.

I gave it to them.

He stood naked, fresh from the hot pool in the rock garden that mimicked the old wilderness, servants toweling him while two of his children still splashed in the water. His woman Koriru waited patiently for the servants to finish. She had picked out for him a robe of softness, one with black stripes dotted by the crest of the Misubisi. She was a Misubisi. He was not.

For a moment he felt a lonely defiance. He would wear his Engineer's uniform to the celebration, black boots and cling-cloth that protected a man in arctic or desert and, with a helmet, in space. On his chest would be the badge of a shipwright.

I am a Lagerian! The smartest male of the greatest line of engineers in the galaxy.

A burst of white fire exploded in the sky, then turned to red and blue. The blue comets whirled in violent spirals, celebrating his achievement. Somewhere a parade was dancing.

But Lager was 400,000 light days behind him, kilodays by starship, across the Noir Gulf, through a star-fog of worlds. He had thrown away his uniform long ago for the soft robes. He remembered kicking it, wiping his feet on it, laughing as he left it. Putting on the Misubisi robe he smiled at that distant elation. It was too late to regret his foolishness. He was not happy, yet he was proud in the sad way a man is proud when he has disproved a cherished theory.

Well, no matter about the Engineer's uniform. He was not of Akira but the Misubisi were all part of him.

Even fierce little Misubisi Koriru was some kind of relative of his. He'd had their women in his hair for a long time. He looked at her in her formal kimono. A ghost of the Caucasian peered thru her Akiran face.

"You should be a Plaek instead of a Misubisi." he demanded impulsively.

Koriru bowed. "I respectfully remind you that you did not marry Misubisi Kasumi!"

He smiled inwardly at her seriousness. "But you're related to me."

She bowed again. "All Misubisi know and cherish how they are blooded to the great Engineer Jotar Plaek."

"Do you know your ties?"

"It is of no consequence. I am proud that a small part of me is you. My life is yours."

"What are the ties!" he insisted.

"For not answering immediately, please pardon me! I am your great granddaughter three times—seven, ten, and forty-one generations back, the last thru Kasumi."

"But of my mad enthusiasm for the machinery of stardrives there is not a trace in you."

Koriru's dark eyes flickered to the floor in embarrassment, showing dark eyelashes. She held her hands in front of her. "My stupidity is inexcusable."

He was inclined to agree. She got mass and charge mixed up and couldn't for the life of her remember whether unlike charges attracted each other and unlike masses repelled each other, or vice versa.

But she nuzzles me in the morning and brags about me to all the powerful people I want to impress so why should I complain? Heredity is strange. Her sister is one of my most brilliant engineers. I suppose I keep her around because I'm lecherous and because she's kind to middle-aged men. She worships me and that makes it easier to be unhappy here out on the Frontier. He smiled at her fondly and sadly. It won't last. It never does. Koriru will get bored with a man she can't understand. But there will be another. The Misubisi clan takes good care of their Shipwright.

"Look at me," he said. She half obeyed, not raising her eyes above his chest. "You have the smallness and grace of Kasumi," he mused; Kasumi whom he had loved and treated badly—was that only seven of his kilodays ago? It was amazing that forty-odd generations of Misubisis had lived out their lives since her death. "You are very beautiful."

"Arigato." Koriru again dropped her gaze in the conventionally humble gesture of one receiving a compliment but couldn't resist a flash look into his eyes to see if the compliment was sincere. He caught her at it and, flustered, she turned quickly to the servants. "You may go. Take the children."

The garden was still. She followed behind him along the rocky path in the tiny woods to their house that only seemed fragile.

"Goti!" she spoke the name of the robobutler.

"Hai!" answered that invisible machine.

"Call a robocar."

"Immediately, mistress!"

The Engineer turned away in displeasure. "I don't want to go to that fornicating celebration," he grumbled.

"You must be there. Excuse me for my disrespectful manner of disagreeing with you."

His eyes changed to twinkles. "I'd rather be here caressing your soft hand and gazing into your beautiful face and getting drunk!" He walked over to the liquor wall. "What I want is a bottle of Scotch. All of it."

Of the universe of drinks she feared Scotch the most because she did not understand its origin or flavor or effect. In one swift motion she threw herself between him and the devil. "No! The honor of the Misubisi clan requests that you be sober!"

He glared at her. "I'm no Misubisi!"

She stood her ground, did not lower her eyes. "As faithful servants the Misubisi built your ship."

"It's not my ship!" He shoved her aside. "It's Misubisi Kasumi's ship!" He reached and took the spherical bottle in his palm.

With one chopping motion she sent the bottle flying to the floor where it shattered. Then she was on her knees, her head touching the floor, apologizing and at the same time explaining the necessity of smashing the bottle.

He was enraged. "Sol's Blazes, I have to distill that stuff myself! It takes two kilodays to age properly!" But she wasn't listening to him; she was too busy apologizing for having done what she had to do, so he picked her up under one arm and clamped his other hand over her mouth. "Goti!" he roared.

"Hai!"

"I order you to spank this wench's bare bottom!"

"It is with abject chagrin that your humble servant informs his lord that he is not equipped to spank."

"Well, there must be some fancy service that you can order to come and do it for you!"

Pause. "My lord, I have been incomprehensibly lax in keeping my records up to date and therefore cannot locate such a necessary service. A thousand pardons."

She bit his hand and he dumped her on a pillow. She was wailing.

"It's all right. I'll go to your space damned party and we'll launch that damn ship and bask in all the glory. But after we get home, I get to spank your bare behind."

She began to smile, having gotten her way, and reached out to polish some dirt from his slippers. "If you do, I'll bite your nose!"

"You wouldn't dare. I'd blow it."

"You're impossible to take care of!"

How much she could look like Kasumi, he thought. It was painful for him to watch the way she held her head in that light with that expression. An ancient tanka of the earthbound Japanese came unbidden to mind.

Deep in the marsh reeds
A bird cries out in sorrow
Piercing the twilight
With its recollection of
Something better forgotten.

He even remembered the poet because it was Kasumi who had given him that poem in final good-bye when remorse had driven him to try to renew their love. One hundred generations ago Ki no Tsurayaki had brushed it onto rice paper back on Earth.

She was hurrying along the street that first night they chanced to meet, the light drizzle as damp as his eyes were now, her light robe soaked and clinging to her in a way no wetproof Lagerian cloth ever would. He simply stared at her. She was the first outworlder he had ever noticed. When she passed by she observed his gaze and smiled at him before she looked away.

"Focus on that trick," he said spellbound, nudging his young Engineer friend.

"Exotic!"

"Let's pick her up. It'll save us a trip." They were waiting for a robocar to take them to the Pleasure Basin.

"Maybe she's not horny. This is the business district."

"Tzom!" he exclaimed. "Did you see that smile!"

"She's an outworlder, Jotar!"

"Same race. Women are the same the galaxy over, ready to go nova at the flick of a neutron. They know a good stud when they see one. How could she do better than us? She knows what an Engineer is by now. Look at yourself in the mirror sometime, joker. You didn't get to be where you are by being a weakling. And besides, I want to do the picking for once." Their robocar had arrived, enveloping them. "Follow that woman," Jotar commanded.

The friend was disturbed by this extreme aggressiveness. "There's two of us," he protested.

"That'll make her wheels go round twice as fast. She'll love it." He leered.

"Women like subtle men."

"Grumble, grumble, grumble." The robocar slid to a stop, cutting off the raven-haired exotic but stopping short of enveloping her. Jotar smiled his smile which had been known to send the bank account of a woman flickering in the last two digits. "We've fallen in love with you," he said.

She looked at them without comprehension and her hand went to the hilt of a dagger in her wide belt.

"That's a dagger," whispered Jotar's friend with urgency.

"Perhaps you don't speak Anglish?" added Jotar hastily.

"Excuse myself for speak your language poorly. I hear barbarous intent. I certain I am mistake." Gently she began to edge around them.

"Our intent was to offer ourselves to you for an entire evening of pleasure. Any way you like it."

Her eyes narrowed. She glanced about for possible escape routes, computing the swiftness of the robocar, then looked Jotar in the eyes with great poise and some small trembling. "It would be small pleasure for you rape one as homely as me. Not beautiful at all."

Jotar was taken aback. It wasn't her self-effacement that surprised him, it was her choice of thrill. On a grade F solidio once smuggled into the Monastery when he was a student he had seen an implausible story about a girl who liked to be raped—but he had never heard of such a thing in real life. Maybe they were pretty odd out there among the outworlds. How would he know? "We're pretty good at rape," he said, nudging his friend, and faking a menacing look. Anything to please such a lovely woman. "And I think you are very beautiful."

"I struggle hard." She was paling. "I bite."

"Oh, that's no problem. We can hold you down so you can't do any damage," he said, trying to get into her fantasy.

"Please not to harm me."

Jotar smiled broadly. "Harming you would be letting art get out of hand, of course, of course. No bruises. Get in; I know just the place to take you."

She fled, dagger in hand—a short run, then a leap down a staired passage where the robocar could not follow. They watched her disappear into the forested ground floor of a soaring hotel, her graceful stride a composite of motions unknown on Lager.

Tzom turned on Jotar. "I told you; I told you! You'll never get anywhere that way! You have to entice them to approach you."

"Yeah, yeah." Jotar stared after the lost beauty absently, a remarkable emotion of infatuation puzzling him. "I didn't follow her script."

"You dummy. It was because you overdid it. You've got to remember how women think. They've got to be in control. If a woman wants to be raped, you can't just rape her. You have to be subtle. She has to provoke being raped or she's not going to enjoy it. Everybody knows that about women but you, dummy!"

"Yeah, yeah. I guess it is the Pleasure Basin for us."

They instructed the robocar to take them to the village of dim bawdy houses and terraced restaurants and gaiety. "How about dancing?"

"Naw," said Jotar, "I'm shorted-out tonight. How about just touring the cafes and getting picked up?"

"Too dull." complained Tzom. "I'd rather get auctioned off at a dance. Get into some clothes flashier than this uniform. Get a sweat up."

"Yeah, but at an auction you have to take who you get. That can be all right except that I'm not in the mood. In a cafe there are easier ways to say no. Go ahead, I'll see you in the morning."

"No, no. We're together tonight." No youth who entered one of the Engineering Orders stayed a celibate Monk—he either mastered the rigorous mental and physical training and graduated into the ranks of the Engineers or he failed and became a Technician and married if a woman proposed to him. The Engineers were forbidden to marry lest a hereditary caste develop and so an Engineer's name died with him. But not his genes.

All over the planet there were places of rendezvous where any woman might go to meet those men who were the physical cream of the planet and have her sexiest fantasy made real. No matter that she was a simple data clerk, or ugly, or old, the Engineers were hers to buy for an evening of pleasure. Only one out of every thousand citizens of Lager became an Engineer but eight percent of all the children born were seeded by Engineers. And engineering talent abounded on Lager and Lager made its name throughout the human galaxy with its engineering marvels.

The robocar let them off at a cafe called the Lion's Loins. Real male lions greeted you with a snarl at the door. But they were lazy. It was the lioness who pounced from her perch above the door that startled unsuspecting clients. Sometimes a menacing lion or two would grab a shy woman by the wrist and herd her over to an Engineer who would chase the lions away after a mock battle. The animals had computer implants, of course.

There was a central lighted bar which acted as a focus because it was the only place where drinks and food were served. The women could appraise a man here before deciding to approach him. Surrounding the bar were dark junglelike alcoves where privacy was at a premium if you weren't upset by an occasional sniffing lion.

"You'll never guess who picked me up the last time I was here," said Jotar grinning.

"Is she here tonight?"

"No, no. Gail Katalina." Katalina was the Third Director of all Lager.

"You're pulling my ear! What's she like?"

"We ended up spending a ten-day together on her yacht. She keeps herself in good condition for her age. She's always busy. It was like being plugged into a thousand volt line."

"I hear she's kinky."

"Naw. You know gossip. She resonates on photography, that's all. She's a good lay. I felt my innocence, but she wanted to keep me. She was going to set me up in Dronau Hills."

"And you said no?"

"I'm busy."

"You're a brave man to turn down that kind of political connection."

"Come on, Tzom, power is warming but it doesn't rub off. You know that. Once you believe it does, and start chasing powerful people, you end up as a moon, and if you get too close you end up as part of their mass. What do you want to drink?"

Jotar was acutely aware of the women around him. He had to be; Tzom never paid attention until a woman spoke to him and by then it was often too late to control what was happening. One dazzler with bare shoulders stared at him from across the bar. He smiled at her but she turned away and he knew he wasn't going to attract her.

Once they had their drinks he settled on a lady with twinkling eyes who looked like she had had enough of a past to be interesting. She was with a young girl, probably her daughter from the facial resemblance, perfect for Tzom. He smiled at the woman with extra warmth when her eye caught his, and winked at the daughter.

But his mind hardly took the flirtation seriously. While he followed Tzom to a table his imagination put him in the villa of some outworld where his robed stranger was expected. This time he would take her arm gently and be careful not to frighten her.

Their table was equipped with a monitor which, when switched on, indicated to a woman that they were free and allowed any woman to view them and listen to their conversation from the privacy of her table. The two Engineers kept their conversation simple. Jotar's attention wandered.

In the semi-light one distant face seemed to be his mother and he lingered on it for a moment—his beloved, brilliant, crazy, naive mother who had met his genetic father in a place like this and had foolishly preserved her love for him in some corner of her mind beyond reality. She had illusions about the beauty and luxury of an Engineer's life based on one ten day experience. In real life she was a Gardener who was responsible for the ecology of 3000 hectares of land in the Miner's Hills and mother of four children, two of them by her husband. Jotar's only sister was also the daughter of an Engineer.

It was his mother who had decided that he was to become a shipwright. He remembered. When he was not yet two kilodays old she'd taken him for a night hike in the hills and they had slept on the grass beneath the brilliant stars.

"People build ships to go to the stars," she said, cuddling him in the sleeping bag. She fastened electronic binoculars on her eyes and slave goggles on his. "See that bright one there?" Cross hairs appeared and disappeared. "That's Goosing. We trade with Goosing in ships we build. See that tiny one there?" The cross hairs reappeared briefly. "Just above Goosing? That's Al Kiladah 43, so far away that no ship yet built has ever reached it. Even though they appear close to each other in the sky, stars may be far apart in space. Someday someone will build a ship that will reach Al Kiladah 43."

"Could I do it?"

"If you became an Engineer."

"Why can't we go there now?" he asked.

She explained to him the problems of the kalmakovian drive in terms a child could understand. "If a starship travels at 200 light speeds, the machinery ages 200 times as fast as normal to fool the gods into thinking it is traveling slower than light so they won't get upset about one of their laws being violated. In fast-time the machinery wears out if you go very far. Engineers have to make it very very reliable. If you aged as fast as a starship, you'd be grown up in thirty days."

"Then I would be old enough to run away from home before I'm old enough!"

"Where would you run to?"

"Al Kaladah 43!"

"Oh my. That's far away. I don't think you know how slow 200 light speeds is, young man."

"Some more stars!" he said. "Show me the farthest one we've reached!"

"Hmm." His mother talked to the binoculars and symbols began flashing across the goggles. "Well, I can show you one of the farthest." It took her awhile to find Akira. "It's on the Frontier."

"Who went there?"

She smiled. "I don't know. Our binoculars are very stupid. Not much memory."

"Turn up the power and we'll see them!"

"That's a tall order for ten credit binoculars. We wouldn't see them anyway. We'd see Akira before men got there."

"I'll build some good binoculars when I grow up."

"Would you like to be an Engineer?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to build ships? Would you like to build the greatest ship that has ever traveled space?" Her words were more of an order than a question.

She began buying him models of ships to build. He got a modular computer for his birthday and every birthday thereafter it became larger. Its memory eventually held the best private collection of starship materials on Lager. Just to manage the horde of data his mother bought for him obsessively, Jotar eventually developed a cross-indexing system unique in starship design history.

Since physical agility was as strong a criterion for graduation from an Engineering Order as intellectual ability, his mother saw to it that he went to dance school. They were country people looking after forest and grasslands and the nearest dance group was 160 kilometers away but she shuttled him there regularly. She overlooked nothing. Most children could play tag with their robogoverness—Jotar's played mathematical games with him.

Sometimes he had to escape from his mother. He'd put on his waldo leggings and jump across the hill meadows with 20 meter leaps pretending he was on a light gravity planet, or he'd leap to the tops of trees and be an animal. Even then he couldn't always escape her. He'd be pursued by thoughts about stardrives.

Before he entered the Black Horse Monastery, before he was full grown, he already knew what mankind's greatest starship would be like.

 

Jotar finished his drink. He knew exactly how long it took a woman with a gleam in her eye to make up her mind. Then he ambled back to the bar. It did not surprise him that the lady and her daughter also chose that moment to refill their glasses.

"Would you care to join our table?"

"Delighted," he said.

Tzom never knew why the handsomest women always invited them when he was with Jotar.

They chatted together over a second drink. The daughter had been recently married and was being educated into the wilder side of city night life by her flirtatious mother. The girl hovered between fascination and shyness while the mother decided where to take them to dinner and when they were going to retire for more serious amusement. Two lions blocked their way as they tried to leave. Jotar made the mistake of kicking one of them, and was slapped to the ground. The lioness stood on his chest and licked his face.

"Do you need help?" asked the girl.

"Damn animal show," he said.

Jotar got stuck with the young one. He never let his boredom show: it would have been unprofessional. They went to his apartment and he tried to please her. He let her hold him after their lovemaking while she drowsed, though he was inclined to push her away. To pass the time he thought of his crazy mother's illusions about the life of an Engineer.

She at least had a conscientious husband, a tolerant man who had created a stable home life for his children and generally ignored his woman's waywardness or at least seldom spoke of it. He would just shrug and say, almost with a smile when their mother disappeared for days at a time, "Women have more lust than men." She had the luxury of knowing her husband and sharing with him in a way that is only possible after long contact.

Damn. Jotar couldn't even remember the name of the girl who had picked him up last night. And a week ago he'd been to a pre-wedding party given by the bridesmaids, and the bride and five bridesmaids had had him, one after the other between drink and lavish food and fun—and he couldn't even remember their faces.

It was something he could get angry about. Like he was angry right now at this girl with her legs around him. She'd get pregnant. She'd tell her husband and they'd celebrate. But she'll never bother to tell me. Not a chance. Sol's Blazes, it makes me angry! He was human. He liked children. He'd cherished his younger brothers and sister. Probably he had seeded thirty children already but he'd never know. They used you and they never came back.

I'll never hold a tiny baby in my arms. The tears were running down his cheeks in the dark and he was furious at his bed partner but he caressed her tenderly. Little baby girl.

When she finally went to sleep, he displaced her arm, slowly, carefully, and sneaked out of bed to his workroom. Without really being aware that an earlier meeting was on his mind, he sketched the outworld woman's robe onto the surface of the workroom's computer terminal, rotating and modifying it, until it matched his memory. Then he sketched the peculiar racial characteristics of her exotic face. While he worked, he smiled, wondering what it would be like to be loved by an outworld woman, pleased to know already that she was not like Lagerian women.

He put the computer into its pattern recognition mode. It overprinted his drawings from time to time, asking for clarifying lines, details. It paused for one hundred seconds before burping out a list of probable worlds. All of them, it turned out, belonged to a class of solar systems which could be traced back to the ancient Japanese race of Terra through a philosophy called the Mishima tradition that placed strong emphasis on old values and had advocated going into space to preserve them.

Jotar spliced the list into the immigration and trade records for an intersection-sort. Only one group matched the available data: a trade mission from Akira, an obscure Frontier sun. They were here to buy heavy automatic machinery and starships. Such a trade mission did not make much sense—Akira was too far away for direct trade. A detailed examination of the papers of the trade mission members gave Jotar what he wanted. The beautiful flower who had dominated his senses was called Misubisi Kasumi and she was the mission linguist.

Elated, he went back to bed, kissing his companion's rump out of happiness. He did not go to sleep. He began to plot the seduction of Kasumi by organizing all the available facts. The central fact was that if they needed starships, he was the galaxy's greatest shipwright. The second fact was that she alone of the mission spoke Anglish. A week of feverish work went by while he prepared and perfected his plan. Like all good plans it solved two problems at once, allowing him to build man's greatest starship and to have a steady lover who excited him.

Engineer Jotar Plaek had yet to build a single ship. He was young, too brilliant to ignore and too brilliant to use. He was proposing a radical restructuring of the kalmakovian field guides that scrapped ten generations of engineering experience. He had solved the new field equations and shown theoretically that structures of positive mass and negative mass could be fabricated into the required guides with impressive inertia-low characteristics. Accelerations of one light speed per ten seconds were feasible, unheard of performance for the best of modern drives. Final velocity would only be ten percent greater than with a regular drive, but that figure was calculated by making enormously conservative estimates of every parameter. Jotar suspected that velocities of one thousand light speeds might eventually be squeezed out of the design, where 250 light speeds was the theoretical maximum for the orthodox guide configuration.

He was so brilliant that he had never been able to find a sponsor. He had papers and credits and consultations and lecture tours that would honor an older man—but no hardware to his name. He knew some of the best Engineers personally but had few contacts in the government except for Gail Katalina, the Third Director, and most dynamic member of the Directorate. As he remembered her, she was delighted to be seen with young men but had no interest in starships. In spite of his boasting, she probably didn't remember him.

So his plan was to bypass Lager and let Akira sponsor the research.

He sent out a feeler to the Akiran mission—terse. He knew they would check his credentials and when they found him to be the most knowledgeable shipwright of Lager, they'd come to him.

Misubisi Kasumi came.

She did not recognize him. He supposed that all Lagerians looked alike to her. They talked business. He spent the whole morning with her at a projection table showing her details of the ship he wanted to build for them.

The table could do anything. It could enlarge or contract the diagrams in its memory, or give you a cross section through any angle. If you wanted iron in red and copper in green it would give you that and blot out all else. If you wanted bulkheads, or wiring, or plumbing, it would give you all of those separately. It would give you parts and explode them. It could show you the kalmakovian drive and the field changes as color changes when the drive was "operative". It could run standard simulated voyages that put every part through an extreme test.

Jotar had spent all of his time as a Monk building the plans for this vessel. It was the completed project which gave him Engineer status. He had spent all of his time as an Engineer revising details and trying to sell it to a sponsor.

In all of the galaxy only on Lager was such a monumental one-man project possible. There were myriad computer routines on tap to design almost anything to any reasonable specifications with fabrication cost optimization and maintenance optimization. If he wanted docking gear, a command would generate it.

Where the computers failed he could use the Monks by assigning a project. They enjoyed such projects because they received much credit for solving problems beyond the capacity of the computers. Sometimes he used other Engineers as consultants. It was the drive unit that was uniquely his.

"How fast?" she asked.

"Do you need a fast drive?"

"Yes. We isolated. We live across the Noir Gulf." She paused.

"Never heard of it."

"It is like cosmic moat across the Sagittarian route to the center of the galaxy. It is one of the great gravitic divides. At narrowest between Znark Vasun and Akira, it has width 175 leagues. At other places it has width five hundred leagues. It has slowed human expansion in that direction. Akira is double isolated. We exist tip of stellar wisp called the Finger Pointing Solward. We can trade with Znark Vasun—long trip. But if we go up, down or sideways—nothing. Gulf. We go down Finger toward galactic center—all Frontier, little trade. In future, when all developed, still we be trading along straight line of stars." She gestured negatively. "Much more expensive than trading in volume of stars. We need speed."

"I can't guarantee it on the first vessel but the speed potential is there. A thousand light speeds."

She gasped. "We want that. Explain me your drive."

"It's not mine. It is just a modified kalmakovian. You know the sort of thing—the difference between propellers and jets. I'll show you the differences." He began to put images on the table's screen.

"I am so sorry for my inexcusable ignorance but I not understand physics. There is positive mass that goes down and negative mass that goes up, there are kalmakovs and einsteins and widgets. And momentum and energy are both composed of mass and velocity but they are different. I never understand."

The kalmakovian effect is the converse of the einsteinian effect.

In einsteinian flight an external energy source like a rocket increases the mass of the ship and time slows for the occupants. They can go to a star and back within months of their life and so consider an einsteinian rocket as a "faster-than-light" drive. It is for them. To the people back on the home planet who have lived by a faster time, the einsteinian rocket has never exceeded the velocity of light.

A kalmakovian drive turns a ship into a "falling stone" without an external field to attract it. It can accelerate at thousands of gravities while still in free fall. It uses no obvious energy any more than a falling stone uses energy because it taps into the greatest source of energy available to a ship, the potential energy called the ship's mass. It converts rest mass into velocity. Because the rest mass of every atom in the ship decreases while the drive is on, time accelerates relative to those worlds outside of the field. And because time accelerates for the occupants of the field, it always seems to them that they are traveling below the speed of light. But to the people back on the home planet the journey took only a matter of months and so they consider a kalmakovian ship as a "faster-than-light" drive.

In the early days of starflight shipwrights learned to protect their passengers from this kalmakovian "starship aging" by using related field phenomena to displace some of the rest mass, ordinarily converted into velocity, to the mass field of special slow-time cabins for the passengers.

Deceleration is no problem. When the kalmakovian field collapses, velocity is automatically reconverted to rest mass and the ship stops at rest relative to its starting coordinates. The photon rocket motors on each starship were only used to compensate for the relative velocity differences between departure star and destination star.

"Well," said Jotar, "send your technical expert to me and I'll explain it to him."

"You said you wanted our sponsorship. Excuse me for not understanding."

"You're in the market for ships. I've seen your specs. You want the best. This is the best. If you buy my ships I'll build them for you. If you give me an order for twenty, I'll give you a price comparable to anything else being built. That's what I mean by sponsoring. I need your money."

She looked doubtful.

"You're used to going to a bureaucrat and ordering something that you can already see being assembled up there in some shipyard—the thousandth edition of a standard vessel. You can do that but you won't get the best."

"Honorable Engineer, you are not dealing with ordinary planet. You are dealing with very humble planet of meager resources."

"But not poor because you are lazy or poor because you breed planlessly, but because you are Frontier and isolated. Your people are ambitious and hardworking."

"Yes."

"The best kind to deal with. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a bargain. I'll throw in the ship's plans."

He could see her tremble with excitement. He wasn't going to tell her how useless those plans would be to her people. They were keyed to an inplace industrial plant, a pyramid of crafts and skills that a Frontier planet couldn't hope to duplicate in less than sixty kilodays. Jotar doubted that there were more than ten worlds in the human ecumen that could build from those plans.

"Why you need us? A day's trading on Lager would buy all planets of Akira."

If only I could explain. He sighed. "Getting something done is not easy. It never was for geniuses like me." He tried to think of an analogy to give her and fell back on pre-space Terran history. It was humankind's common background, times and people and clashes that every civilized man related to. "I could have sold aircraft carriers to the Japanese navy in 1925 AD; I doubt that I could have sold flying bombers to the United States Army Air Force in 1925 AD."

She laughed.

"Here. I feel like a snack." He took her away from the table and sat her down on pillows. "I dug up a bottle of rice wine just for you." And he poured her a glass.

"Do you drink rice wine?" she asked in surprise.

"Never touched it before in my life."

"It is my shame that I have never either." She spoke with sadness.

He produced a plate of delicacies—cauliflower with mayonnaise and vinegar, a tofu and tomato aspic, roast peppers which weren't peppers at all but a plant from a world called Tekizei, and raw fish.

"What is this?" she said, tasting it with her fingers.

"You've never had raw fish? I took it from an Akiran recipe book."

"Raw fish on a space ship? I am so sorry but you are out of your mind."

"What are you familiar with?"

"Hard tack." She laughed.

"I see." He paused, reflecting upon the tales of Frontier hardship. "What's Akira like?"

"Ohonshu, the major planet, not need to be terraformed. The plants are pink—oh not really, but pink on their bellies. They flower on the ends of the leaves and the seeds form in leaf stem. Terran life not thrive well in wild, except for grass. We have tiny wild horses, real horses. Terran birds have done well, I not know why. The colonists were mostly bushido fanatics caught in the mysteries of a religion their parents not understand and their children not really understand either. They left us strange and beautiful monasteries. It took fanatics to cross the Noir Gulf. They were good people. But I not remember it much. We left when I was small. The captain is my father. My mother not come. It's far away. Living on planets seems strange to me."

"Has being planet bound frightened you?"

"Yes! Oh yes!"

"Eat your raw fish."

"Do you like the rice wine?"

"Oh yes. Sake is in my genes."

He was happy. "You are a pleasant person to be with," he said, trying to draw her into a commitment without being as direct as he was inclined to be.

In response she merely lowered her eyelashes.

It exasperated him. How by the fire of a sun's blazes was he supposed to handle a mannish woman? He paused, then tried again, gently. "Have you been outside of the city?"

"No. But like to. Lager seemed so lush from space!"

"You must have been looking at my parents' place. It is beautiful country. Once you are free of the main burden of your work we could visit them and take a hike along the river. A hundred kilometer walk. You'd love it."

"A hundred kilometer walk would be therapeutic for my soul, but rubber space legs would protest."

"I'll give you waldo leggings. We'll camp out."

The next day he saw Kasumi again. She brought him a small present of dried fruit. He held her at arm's length, looking, smiling. It was good to see the same woman twice.

The next ten days were hectic. Between catnaps, he worked endlessly with the Akiran mission, ironing out the details. They signed a contract. The news spread like a nuclear excursion: Jotar Plaek was going to build his crazy ship. Those were good days.

He found it easy to be with Kasumi, anticipating her grace when he was away from her and marveling in it when she came to him. There was something exquisite about just letting things happen, not investing energy into making them happen. He was good for her. Unobtrusively encouraging her initiative, he brought out a hidden boldness and confidence. Once when they were eating together in a cafe, she struck up a conversation with an Engineer at the next table and took him with her for the rest of the afternoon, letting Jotar fend for himself. Jotar was pleased that because of him she had become more of a woman than she'd ever been before in her life. When he was most content he would think that it was a good thing for Lager that they all pumped the blood of their mothers; he imagined Lager as a very quiet Eden with its Eveless men waiting for the apples to fall before they ate.

One day Kasumi was swimming nude at a river bend. She came to him and asked him to towel her off. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. Each felt aroused. Each refused to make the first move. It was like being a Technician. Love. A woman. Contentment. No worries. He took her to the meadow where he had first seen Akira and finally their chemistry drove them to become lovers. They whispered sweet nothings all night and licked at the dew in the morning with their tongues.

When the dew had melted but the grass was still rosily lit, she recited a poem by Akihito from the almost sacred Manyoshu.

"I was wandering
Among flowered spring meadows
To pick violets
And enjoyed myself so much
I slept in the field all night."

The work orders went out, financed by Akiran funds. Countermanding orders were issued by the government's APCT and Jotar flew to the capital to straighten out an administrative mess caused by some lunkhead who couldn't understand an outworld investment in a project which had been turned down by the Lagerian Aerospace Technical Oversee. He got through the fracas by a compromise which required him to hire a watchdog staff to prevent the leakage of Classified Skill and Craft Forms. LATO then issued a Duty Liaison requiring computer-filed abstracts of all progress down to the Work Action Order level.

Within four days of assembling the new staff a minor Liaison Engineer panicked at the new methods of manipulating positive and negative mass fabrications and the project was temporarily halted—Injuncted for a Retro Study. That lasted twelve days. Jotar managed a Reactivation Order but the renewed research had to be transferred to deep space where facilities weren't equipped to handle it. Jotar spent forty days building a new space factory.

Then they ran into real fabrication problems which no simulation could have anticipated. Each glitch was solved but every solution seemed to generate new troubles which had no obvious source. Jotar found to his horror that he wasn't a hardware man. He brought in consultants and that cost money.

Finally some key parts arrived for the drive assembly but they had been fabricated to normal starship specifications which weren't good enough in the new configuration. Jotar sued and was countersued. He won the case but was sued from another quarter for nonpayment because he had neglected to transfer funds, and, alarmed, the government froze funds to cover work orders which had as yet not been issued. He hired lawyers. They sent him a bill.

In 200 days Jotar had gone through all of his Akiran capital. He had promised twenty ships. Not one was remotely finished. In desperation he turned to sex. He didn't think that Third Director Gail Katalina would even remember him, considering her reputation, but he was wrong. She returned his call within two kilosecs.

"Of course I remember you! You're the Engineer with the most beautiful eyelashes on Lager! I'll send an executive plane for you. Can you pack today? I'll meet you at the Jongleur Gardens. My husband won't be there. I may be late, but that will give you time to make yourself beautiful."

The executive cruiser was prompt and polite and like all high level government roboplanes did not take orders from the passengers. It had been instructed to fly the scenic route through the Lebanor Pass, which it did—skimming the mountains' treetops at a speed never less than 500 meters per second. Jotar kept swallowing his heart.

For all that haste he arrived at the Jongleur mansion to find himself alone. He was put up in the master bedroom with a wooden fire blazing. He was fed delicious food by invisible robocooks and told not to wear his uniform by an invisible robovalet who provided him with lavish clothes of a cut which might be worn on stage but never in public. He swam. He read. He tried on clothes and practiced entrances and lines and charm. That night he slept alone.

Director Katalina arrived late the next afternoon. Her hair was white. Her face was lined by the act of smiling so many times at the victories of her ruthless rise. She hugged Jotar, pinched his bottom and handed him her briefcase. Her two female executive secretaries followed closely to stay inside the shadow of her power.

At dinner she had a videophone beside her wine and continuously interrupted their trivial conversation by answering calls that came in to command her attention. She'd be kidding him about the time he fell overboard on the yacht and switch into an animated discussion with some disembodied voice concerning the credit rating of the Amar Floating Peoples who did not qualify as a solar system, and as quickly come back to comment on the bouquet of the wine.

Once Jotar made the mistake of letting the conversation wander around to the subject of starships. She gazed at him with true adoration while he spoke, so he spoke with increasing fire and clarity.

She cut in. "Your intelligence makes you so sexy I can't stand it anymore!" And with that thought she pulled him off to the bedroom where she called up her secretaries, instructing them to handle all incoming communication.

First she undressed Jotar. Then she posed him for inspiration. Then she took out her paints and began to decorate his body while he watched in the mirror-screen. Whenever she asked for his advice he praised her. His ear itched.

She became so enthusiastic about her masterpiece that she called in her secretaries to help photograph him for her collection. They took endless photographs, developing them with different dyes, cutting, distorting, reposing him. He was pleased that she was pleased.

Once her assistants were dismissed, Director Katalina had him carry her to the bed. "Do you remember how I like it, you big beautiful rascal?"

He did. By morning he was suffering a bad attack of anxiety. He had done everything conceivable to please her and she had never given him an opening. In desperation he decided to serve her breakfast in bed. He knew a recipe he was sure the robocooks didn't know because Kasumi had taught it to him, but he got caught in the kitchen by one of the secretaries who hadn't bothered to robe herself.

"Hi, big boy."

"Hi."

She began to fondle him.

"Look, I'm just trying to get some breakfast for her."

The secretary spoke some commands. "Let the robocook do it. I'd like to have you for a moment. I'm much younger than she is."

"The robocook isn't up to this particular dish."

"You don't understand, boy. I'm her executive secretary. Everything she acts on goes through my hands. You have to please me, too."

"I don't think she'd like that." He didn't dare remove the executive hands from his belly.

"She'll never know a thing, pretty boy. It'll only take us half a kilosec."

He got back to the kitchen while the just prepared breakfast was still hot, and carried it up to the Third Director, cursing the robocook and the secretary. The old woman smiled at him. She pulled him down and kissed him.

"You want something, don't you? What is it?"

Oh thank Newton! He sat down on the bed and composed himself.

"It's about your starship project, isn't it? You're broke. See, I know everything. You want money to continue. Money, money, money—that's all an Engineer ever thinks of."

"Sometimes," he said.

"What makes you think I'll give it to you?"

"All I wanted to tell you was that my starship is important to Lager."

She laughed. "We sell every starship we can make. Your venture isn't important for Lager, it is important for you."

Well, I tried.

She laughed at his misery. "You fool! What would I be if I couldn't do favors? Don't worry. I'll handle everything. It will be all right."

He made love to her in gratitude and she enjoyed his total giving of himself.

Back at his central office, he waited three days. The government put him in bankruptcy to save him from the responsibility for his mistakes. They took over the project of building his ship. The sudden loss of control shocked him: he had an office but no command lines. His faith in the power of sex was shaken.

Then Kasumi timorously announced that she was pregnant.

Jotar did his best to get the State to take over his debt to Akira but the reorganized project refused to underwrite Akiran interests. With that blow Kasumi's father and three of his closest associates committed suicide.

Kasumi called. Jotar refused to see her. He wanted to see her but he couldn't face her. He began to drink heavily. He disconnected his communicator. Finally he put his furniture and library in storage and disappeared. Nobody knew where he was because he was on an island beachcoming with a woman who had run away from her husband but would probably go back to him when her money ran out. They had met at a cafe in the Pleasure Basin and she had coaxed him into chucking it all with her.

One day while this woman helped him carve out an outrigger, the roasting sun at their naked backs, he told her about building the galaxy's greatest space canoe, a tale he embellished with truth, lies, puns, and emotion. The idea seemed hilarious to him, a fantasy laid on him by his mother when he was too young to reject it. The trouble was he wasn't sure it was a fantasy. Then for months he didn't think at all. He speared fish.

His woman left him, having learned more about canoes than she wanted to know. He drifted and another woman picked him up. Lusena was a distortion photographer who took pictures and fed them into a special computer. He was fascinated. By playing with the commands and selecting out only those image distortions that caused an emotional resonance the photograph evolved in color and pattern until it became a setting from one's private dream world. Jotar showed Lusena's art to everyone, raving about it for kilosecs. Lusena had a haunting dream world. All that came out when Jotar tried it were pictures of grotesque pinheaded women or elabyrinth long starships that faded complexly into the sky. Time passed.

Jotar was being supported by two waitresses from a local pub in their houseboat when his sister found him. Brother and sister, each seeded by a different Engineer, fought for days. They ranted themselves into a good mood by sunset whereupon he'd cook the three women a sumptuous meal, stews boiled in beer, beer cakes, beered chicken casserole, and the four of them would reminisce about childhood during the cool of the evening. In the morning the fight would start again.

She sneered at his unwillingness to drive ahead against all obstacles. She derided him for being ruled by the considerations of inferiors. She described what they were doing to his ship in his absence. She flattered his genius for seeing the piece of the puzzle that escaped all other eyes. She goaded his pride. She won. He went back to work.

When he returned to the project he was astounded that he was still respected. Genius had its prerogatives. He was astonished that he still believed in his ship with an insane passion. He worked hard. The ship had what he'd always wanted—government sponsorship. He was now willing to be humble when they told him that the fabrication problems needed research and time.

Half a kiloday passed before he realized that, even working, he had no control over the drift of the project. A whole kiloday passed before he saw the trend of the drift.

The project Engineers were solving problems creating solutions closer to something they already knew. As the total solution began to emerge, Jotar panicked. He ran in seven directions trying to trace down the individual decisions. He got passed from Engineer to Engineer to Craft Guild to Economist to Production Manager to Beer Hall.

Finally Keithe Walden took him hunting. Walden was the man in charge since the bankruptcy, an older Engineer, jowls sagging. He could make ten thousand men play choo-choo train in unison. They had it out in a duck blind with bugs buzzing around their heads.

"Keithe, I think you're full of meadow-muffins."

"Jotar, if you were redesigning a woman, you'd take off the breasts for streamlining . . ."

"Would I!"

"You'd take out the kidneys because they smell. You'd . . ."

"Now look! I like women the way they are!"

"No you don't. You'd have a thousand improvements if you thought about the problem for a kilosec. What changes would you make?"

"They'd be practical changes. I'd put in a servomechanism so that a woman could control her ovulation. Shreinhart showed that the immunological system could be vastly improved if it had better data processing capabilities. There's no reason bones should break or get brittle with age—there are much better materials. I think it is shocking that, kilogram for kilogram, solid state devices have more storage and logic capacity than neural tissue. How about an electromagnetic sense? And women certainly should have a penis to piss with."

"You could go on and on, couldn't you?"

"Probably."

"That's what I mean. Then you'd start to fool with the genes so this new woman could reproduce herself—and you'd be in big trouble because of the incredible cross-correlative interdependence of the genetic interaction. Evolution is a slow thing. You can only change marginal things in something as complicated as a woman or a starship—and each change has to be proved out over generations before you can make the next incremental change. A man has 98% of the genes of a chimpanzee, remember that. You want too much change, too soon. You have to start with what you have."

"I'll give you a herd of horses," said Jotar, "and you can start breeding me a flock of birds out of them."

Jotar took up billiards and poker. He danced and wenched. He spent long days playing with his sister's children. Walden built a prototype ship and took orders for five hundred. It hit the news. LATO called it Jotar Plaek's ship and said it was the greatest starship ever launched.

Yeah. We changed the brass doorknobs to silver.

Two days later Misubisi Kasumi followed him home to his apartment. He didn't notice her until he went to close the door. A small girl was clinging to her leg. "Here is daughter you abandoned," she said bitterly.

Shock. "Hi." He went down on his knees but the child turned her face away in shyness.

Kasumi disciplined the child. She held her face toward Jotar. "You must see mean father who abandoned you."

Tears were running down Jotar's face. She was the first woman who had ever brought one of his children to see him. He was touched beyond anything that had ever happened to him.

"A beautiful kid. Your side of the family. Kasumi, come in. I'm sorry about it all. I got caught up in my own madness. I was destroyed like everybody else."

She marched into the richly furnished apartment, gripping the child's hand. "You seem to be doing quite well."

"I manage."

"You built your ship."

"It's not mine. They changed the grille. It comes in new colors."

"That's good enough for me. Take an order for twenty red ones."

"Sol's Blazes! I wish I owned one to give you! Nothing's mine! I control nothing!"

"You ruined us!" she screamed.

"Yeah, yeah. I ruined you. I won a lot by doing that. How have you made out? Do you still have your ship?"

"Yes."

"Thank Space for small blessings. Why are you still here on this fossilized world when you could be out on the Frontier where people are still alive!"

"The mission must bring back something."

"Have a shot of whiskey. I've got no sake. Some milk for the kid?"

"No thank you."

"So what are you going to take back that you can fill your holds with for free?"

"Knowledge."

"It's a good cargo. They don't sell it for free here."

"Since you left me I have had relationships with many of your Engineers." Her voice flowed like a starlight-stirred wind of helium on a sunless planet. "Each has given me something out of pity. I have enough to build industrial empire. I want you to give me everything you know about starships. You owe it to me."

"I'll give you my head in a pickle jar."

"Don't offend me. I hate you enough to kill you!"

"Sit down. I'm on your side. I'm ashamed. Let me think of the resources I do have." He paused. "I collected a fantastic library when I was a child. I'll give it to you. I'll give you the original plans of my ship." He laughed. "I'll give you the plans for that flying toilet bowl they built in my name. But," he slammed out with careful enunciation, "it wont do you any good. Knowledge is only valuable if it can be activated. What can you do with a riddle you don't ken?"

"My people are brilliant."

"I'm brilliant," said Jotar, angered. "If I hadn't grown up on Lager I'd know nothing about starships! Nothing! I could wallow in every computer memory about starships that has ever been recorded and I'd learn nothing!"

She glared at him with hatred.

"I'm not arguing with you. I'll give you all I can. Thank you for bringing my daughter." Impulsively he brought out a toy he'd bought for his sister's youngest. It was a transparent ball, feather light, hard. "Take it for her. She'll like it. It will talk to her and show her pictures that illustrate its story. It is a story kaleidoscope. It will never repeat the same story. Look. What's a wirtzel?" he asked the sphere.

"Once upon a time there was a wirtzel who lived in a cave . . . ." The surface was vibrating. Images were beginning to form. The child watched in fascination.

"Look at it, Kasumi! It would take your Frontier culture three generations just to understand the plans for that toy. Black Hole, woman. If it's knowledge you want, you need to take a university with you!"

She was crying.

Jotar hung his head. "What could I have done? Tell me. It was a disaster."

"You could have put your arms around me when I cry," she sobbed.

Kasumi left him in a turmoil. He thought all night about her, putting the pieces together. He could not sleep. He sat in a trance on the balcony, bathed in the light of the moon Schnapps, compiling memories. We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers! we can, we can, we can, we can, we can swig forty beers! Memories. The first drunken orgy when they had graduated from the Monastery, their vows of celibacy dead, singing, the mob, the screaming girls chasing after a piece of virgin, rioting, getting carried off by a flying wedge of amazons, to be young, to be proud that one could build anything. A long way from there to the duck blind. I'll give you a herd of horses and you can start breeding me a flock of birds out of them! Sarcasm. Maybe if one went back to the common ancestor of horse and bird you could breed a bird. A lot of breeding. Was Akira far enough back on the technological tree? Kasumi crying. You need to take a university with you! Why not?

He worked it out because she was leaving and his daughter was leaving and he had an irrational desire to go with them. His images were of them working side by side to build the ship on a world that cared.

To accomplish his purpose the ship of the Akiran trade mission had to be refitted. He still commanded that kind of resource. Its holds became a fifty person self-contained college subject to fast-time. He left room for six students in the crew's slow-time protective field. The best students could be cycled through slow-time with him and Kasumi so that he could work with them personally. He intended to breed the best students until shipwright decisions were in their genes. By the time they got to Akira he would be bringing with him a 400 kiloday old university. It would have more tradition and history than Akira itself. With that base he could build a great ship even out there on Frontier.

Jotar was short of students. Who wanted to burn up in fast-time for a goal they'd never live to see? Misubisi Kasumi ordered some of her crew to become students and being good vassals they obeyed. Jotar found four Monks who had flunked out and couldn't bear the thought of becoming mere Technicians. He took them. He took three Technicians and two Craftsmen. He found six women like his mother and took them.

Only when they departed did Kasumi tell him that she was going in fast-time, to die in repentance for failing to carry out her mission. He couldn't convince her otherwise. She said that she wanted to work directly with the college in its infancy, to see that it grew up understanding Akira, the place where the descendants of the first students would work. But he knew she chose that exotic way to commit suicide because she had not forgiven him.

Jotar saw Kasumi only once again while she was still alive. Their first stop was at the small star Nippon where he picked up ten students and bought a quantity of genuine Japanese genes. His original students had inbred and were already looking too Caucasian to be received smoothly into the Akiran culture. He had brought with him the frozen sperm of 1000 Engineers but he didn't want to have to rely on such a source.

Kasumi was old and wrinkled. They had communicated, but only through the time barrier where she lived 150 times as fast as he did. He was shy with her, his sorrow at losing her still fresh in his heart. Nor was it real to him that his daughter was older than he was, his grandchildren adult.

Nippon was a red star and consequently the surface of Nippon Futatsu was unnatural to human eyes. Kasumi took him to a mountain inn where she served him tea at a tiny shrine in a ceremony he did not understand. He could feel her warmth. It made him apologetic but she only smiled and pressed his lips gently with her hand.

"I have lived so long
That I long for the eon
Of rejected love
When I was so unhappy,
Remembering it fondly."

She poured his tea to refill the tiny cup. "Excuse my liberties with a poem by Kiosuke. Do you have a poem for me or is your mind too young to partake of such frivolity?" The twilight inspired him. He did not know how to create a tanka.

"Why is the horizon tree
Fixed against the setting sun
When it is the sun that is eternal?"

Their talk concerned the college. Kasumi worried about the quality of the students. She knew that they were not good enough even to get into a Monastery on Lager. He laughed and reminded her of their different perspectives. What seemed a painful and difficult development to her was a miraculously swift growth to him.

She held his elbow as they strolled along the lake to their solitary cabin which stood half on stilts. The only light she permitted was a candle behind a translucent wall. "Darkness is the friend of age. How fortunate I am. It is an old woman's dream to wake up one morning and find herself in an enchanted land with her favorite long-lost lover, still young of body, potent, and yet not wise enough to have recovered from her charms!"

They made love on the mats, he amazed by her mellowness, she happy to be young again for an evening.

"Remember that Engineer who accosted you in the streets the day you arrived on Lager? You had to run away to save yourself."

"I do! I was terrified."

"That was me."

"Not you!"

"Yeah. That's when I fell in love with you."

"You beast!"

"I was zapped out of my mind. I cooked up that whole scheme to sell you ships just to meet you."

"But you left me!"

"Don't men always leave their first love? They don't have anyone to compare her with to know what they are losing."

"Jotar, you fool. Doesn't it terrify you to find men like yourself out among the stars?"

"The glorious stars gave me you. Is your head comfy on my shoulder? Gods, but I've missed reaching through that barrier to touch you."

When they reboarded their ship in orbit, Kasumi sent him as a gift her granddaughter by her fourth child. Yawahada was a vexing youth who, her grandmother confided in a covering note, coveted Jotar as a lover because he lived in slow-time and she was displeased with the men available to her and wished for a new generation of men to grow up while she remained young. Kasumi was dead and four new generations had risen before Yawahada of the budding breasts, now pregnant by Jotar, found a lover among her descendants who pleased her fickle heart.

By then the college was shaping in ways so fast that Jotar spent his full time monitoring its growth. Every tenth day he checked for cultural deviations that might destroy its purpose. He had the power to change what he wanted. Cultural evolution had elevated him almost to the mystical status of Emperor as provided for in the bushido ethic that came with the college as Kasumi founded it—he was the god from slow-time who awoke at intervals and judged.

After Kasumi's death Jotar began to run the breeding program with an iron hand by the best rules of animal genetics. He never interfered with the natural liaisons which arose among the Misubisis but he alone determined whose chromosomes were carried by every new embryo planted in a womb.

He selected for physical resemblance to the Akirani and for physical perfection—visual acuity that lasted into old age, longevity, coordination, flawless metabolism. You cannot breed for an ability your environment does not require. Jotar required cooperation, craftsmanship, and analysis and so was able to select for those characteristics. The improvement from generation to generation was remarkable.

Part of the improvement was cultural. As the college solved its problems of organizing and transmitting its knowledge it became easier for the less brilliant to do outstanding work.

Part of the improvement was the interaction between culture and breeding. Jotar wanted people predisposed toward fine craftsmanship so he set up a microelectronics industry to build starship brains. He bred the best craftsmen and hardened the electronic specifications from generation to generation until his students were actually selling their extraordinary products in various ports of call. He invented the science of positive and negative mass microstructures to teach kalmakovian fabrications in the limited space available onboard. It was only an exercise in craftsmanship to allow him to sort out his most talented students but they stunned him by producing actual miniature stardrives.

He never stopped delving through his brain for challenging projects. He had only fifty students but in fast-time they were the equivalent of 7500 students. They designed special ships to probe the fringes of black holes, automatic freighters, ships to penetrate regions of dense interstellar gas, ships to sample the atmospheres of stars, ships that could land on a planet, warships to meet the thrust of an alien invasion, tiny robot ships that could carry messages between the stars, a transport vehicle to carry 100,000 colonists. He listed every known ability required by a shipwright, monitored each individual for those abilities, and selected for them.

He seized all opportunities. When they were in some stellar port he sold their services to repair damaged ships of designs they'd never seen before. They had to work with their hands in unfamiliar shops and sometimes right out there in spacesuits. He contracted them out to the hardest problems at the cheapest price. They never complained. They did what he told them to do. They would have died for him.

The strange fast-time culture of the Misubisi took some devious turns. It developed a hedonistic period which produced a literature and spirit that grew up into a wisdom that got lost in a dark brooding upon the Japanese past that gave way to a rediscovery of simple crafts like pottery and multicolored wood block printing that led to a revival of dance and theater which produced a playwright who inspired political revolution and mutiny by twenty students whose places were filled by a new generation of loyalist fanatics whose children adopted the clothes and philosophical games of a passing port of call until their children resurrected an Akiran identity from an almost devout curiosity about the coming Akiran experience.

And so they arrived at Znark Vasun, facing the empty Noir Gulf, Akira the most brilliant star in a sky forlorn of stars. Eight of the Misubisi jumped ship for passage in a freighter headed across the Gulf. It was the way they chose to reach the Akiran system alive to taste the final triumph of their millennia-long quest. One slender Misubisi woman, filled with a romantic longing for an imagined Akiran paradise, unwilling to die while she was so near to heaven, seduced Jotar and begged him to take her with him in slow-time. He knew the source of her devotion but didn't mind; he liked her company and her body. Another young girl stowed herself away in his cabin, unwilling to grow old and die without building a real ship. He found her nearly starving long after they had left Znark Vasun. She was too afraid of his wrath to come out of hiding.

The remaining Misubisi continued in fast-time across the Noir Gulf as they always had and died there breeding new generations. The very last generation defied "the god beyond the barrier" by birthing a rash of "love children" who took the ship's population past seventy. They knew they were close to home.

Jotar weathered it all. Later he laughed and called himself the longest surviving Japanese Emperor in human history. Halfway across the Gulf they entered the peninsula called The Finger Pointing Solward. No one was happier than Jotar when their goal star showed as a disk.

Akira blazed on the portside.

They were adrift, the kalmakovian velocity reconverted to rest mass. Photon rockets blazed to life, changing their velocity by fourteen kilometers per second so that they could go into orbit around the planet Ohonshu.

They were greeted with incredulous enthusiasm. Akirani wept openly in the streets and on the farms. Two honor shuttles were sent to bring them down and, of course, they were landed at Tsumeshumo Beach where the first two shiploads of colonists had touched down.

Each of the Misubisi were given a torch and they knew what to do. Wild with joy they ran along the beach to the Shrine on the Jodai Hill where they embraced and cried and gave their thanks. Jotar marveled. Now he could build his ship! He went into the Demon's Dance with all of his old Engineering Power. And when he was finished he did a flourish of twenty rapid handsprings.

Panting, he saw that all Misubisis had frozen to watch him. For a second after he finished they stood still, then they bowed. Takenaga's lords were there. They too bowed. The son of the governor of the Rokakubutsu system bowed. Other lords of the outworld systems around Akira bowed.

The first person to move was a graceful child, not yet a woman, who came forward with flowers. She kneeled and offered them, her eyes cast down, as she delivered a prepared speech thanking him for bringing them home. Strange how these people of his called this planet home.

He tipped up her face and kissed her cheek and gave her the smile he had often given to women back on Lager when he wanted to encourage their attention. That was his first meeting with Misubisi Koriru. They became friends. When she was older, she became his mistress.

And so here he was, too old to fight much anymore, philosophical about his last lost battle, going to a celebration that Koriru wanted him to go to when all he wanted to do was get drunk. Why was he starting to do whatever Koriru said?

Ah, those Misubisi. Those scoundrels that Kasumi had planted and he had nourished. They listened with alertness to everything said by the great Jotar Plaek. They hopped to attention and instantly obeyed his every command. But they always came back and, so sorry, they could not do what he requested, and please would he allow them the honor of disemboweling themselves or some such rot. When he refused they humbly offered a second inferior course of action, which, it always turned out, they had already implemented.

The ship had arrived to find a shockingly primitive technology on Akira—that was the trouble. Well, not primitive. One's choice of words could not be too strong. Incongruous was the word. Jotar fully expected to find a computer-guided wooden plow one of these days.

Koriru drove him to the outskirts of Temputo, where they entered the procession that snaked through the city to the Imperial Palace grounds of the Takenagas. Happy people watched. Vendors scurried around selling hot delicacies to the crowd. Children watched from trees. Clowns wearing waldo leggings jumped about the procession to make the crowd laugh. Elaborate paper animals, some of them forty meters long, slithered among the noble daimyo. Computer-implanted birds of paradise added punctuation marks of color to the procession, flying back and forth, resting on the heads of children. Everybody waved paper accordion models of the Massaki Maru on the end of sticks.

At the Palace, lesser daimyo were separated from greater daimyo for the feasting. Jotar was pillowed with the greatest, the nobles of the Akiran tributary systems: red Rokakubutsu, Hodo Reishitsu, desolate Iki Ta, and beautiful Butsudo. All of these men stood to gain enormous wealth from an Akiran shipbuilding industry. Wily old Takenaga himself—the man who had ended Akiran democracy and money wars between the merchant lords—even put in an appearance.

They liked the ship. The talk was all about Imperial Akira. Now they could expand down The Finger. At the knuckle end of The Finger was the whole of the Remeden Drift. Power, commerce, glory.

The moment came when the Massaki Maru was tugged from its assembly cocoon in space, already crewed for its maiden voyage to Butsudo. The Captain was in direct communication with Takenaga at the Palace.

"Heika, we await your orders!"

"Do us honor. Launch it!"

"Hai! Suiginitsu! Generate the field!"

"Hai!" came Suiginitsu's reply.

The first starship built on the farside of the Noir Gulf faded from the screen.

Jotar was not pleased. He was ashamed. Even in ancient times, had such an inferior ship ever come out of the shipyards at Lager? The acceleration of the Massaki Maru was shockingly sluggish. Its top velocity was ninety light speeds. Too many compromises had been made with reliability. Fast-time ruthlessly destroyed unreliable systems. He doubted that the ship would last more than five kilodays in service.

The Misubisi collective decision had been that it was more economical to build such a ship than to import a better one from across the Noir Gulf. They were right if they manufactured at least twenty of them. Still he was ashamed. He would not have come to the rim of civilization for that.

Later, as the confusion of the feast brought forth a new course of food, one of the Misubisi women came to him.

"Hanano! You're as nervous as that day I found you starving in my closet! What is it? I know. You're afraid that load of junk will shed its skin all along the route to Butsudo! No matter. Eat! Sit with us! We'll spend an hour here together and afterwards rub pot bellies!"

She fingered his hair affectionately. "If I had only known what a monster you were, I'd have chosen to die in the Gulf rather than throw myself at your mercy. Come." She tugged at him. "I beg of you to come with Koriru and me."

"You will please come," said Koriru.

They took him to one of the Palace gardens where some thirty of the Misubisi clan had gathered. More of them weren't there only because they had vowed the whole clan would never meet in one place at the same time. The handsome hulk of Misubisi Jihoku confronted them.

"Hanano! You found him, the Disapproving One! Welcome. Koriru, you've kept him sober! How do we honor such self-sacrifice!"

"I'm not sober, you pile of shit!" he retorted.

"In my unworthy opinion, Plaek-san, when you can still walk, you are sober!"

There was laughter, but nervous laughter. They knew he despised their ship, had not wanted it built.

"If that junk heap just gets back here, I'll give all gold stars!" Jotar roared drunkenly. "Not for your engineering abilities, but for your monumental good luck!"

Jihoku laughed. "Water on a frog's face! We have a millennia-long tradition of your insight into our inconsequential efforts, threads holding together a history longer than many planets, longer than Akira's, and throughout it all we have learned the joy and profit to ourselves of carrying you, oh noble bag of complaints, on our backs. Complain away!"

The Misubisi cheered Jihoku good-naturedly. They were happy. They were celebrating. It was their day.

Koriru stepped forward. "If I may be allowed to intrude, I have a poem from that tradition. Misubisi Kigyoshin of the twenty-third generation wrote it when the plans of his life's work were cut to pieces by Plaek-san. We were at Kinemon and they had met face to face.

Built of my sinews
Flowing over nebula
My crafted starbridge
Pleases not our tortoise god
Whose dreams are swift as wishes.

"He's been slashing at us since the mists of our time and his criticism has made us great!"

"Hai!" yelled thirty voices.

Hanano stepped forward, trembling. She had desperately wanted to build ships and had spent her time with him in the Gulf picking his brain. She was his top engineer. "We wish to give our tortoise god a gift tonight from our hearts and from the hearts of all our ancestors. It will not be good enough but it is our best."

Jotar was sobering. They were afraid of him, really afraid of his disapproval. And yet . . . somehow . . . they were about to give him something . . . if he disapproved . . . they would be destroyed.

It was a wooden box the size of a coffin and he opened it. The model of a starship floated out, glowing bluely. The name on the bow, printed not in their chicken-track script but in Anglish, was The Jotar Plaek. It was his ship. But it wasn't.

"The field fins are wrong," he said.

"I am so sorry to disagree," said Hanano, "but they are a solution to the field equations subject to the fabrication constraints we have assumed."

The robed shipwrights were tense.

"You're telling me that you're building this ship?" He stared about the garden crazily.

"Hai!" said Hanano fiercely. "I have personally checked the entire critical path analysis. We know every problem that will arise, when it will arise, and how to solve that problem. The Plaek is to be a fifth-generation ship. We are to build ships of the Massaki Maru class for two more kilodays, at which time the Akiran craftsmen will be ready to build the next generation's prototype. Our fourth generation will be the first significant departure in starship design since Lager produced the Hammond variation. The fifth generation will be your ships."

Jotar stared at her. "And how long is this going to take?"

Jihoku spoke up. "I am very displeased to inform you that you will be dead by then." He bowed to express sorrow.

"I guessed there was a catch."

"We respectfully remind you," lashed out Koriru, "that you have asked thousands of us to die in this adventure. Only a handful of us survive!" She swept her arm about the room. "It does not matter that we die before the summit is reach. Banzai!" Ten thousand years. "It matters only that it is reached!"

"Do you think you can do it?"

"Hai!"

"Why didn't you tell me that this was going on?"

"We wanted to be sure. It was a gift we could not offer lightly. Our honor as shipwrights!"

Jotar Plaek held the model in his hands, turning it about, the tears running down his aging cheeks. He stared at the name printed on the bow.

"Look at that. A fat lot of good that's going to do me! Have you ever met an Akiran who could pronounce my name! Have you?" he challenged them all.

Then he was hugging his Misubisi people, each of them, one at a time.

 

Back | Next
Framed