Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (47 page)

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.