"What!"
She took it from him and held it in the light. "Why do you think the warriors fight for us? Because we are physically stronger? We are not. Twist the top to the right until it clicks once, and the two ends will slide slightly apart. Press the two ends together, and every warrior's necklace within 100 meters will explode. Twist until it clicks again, then press the two ends together and every necklace within two thousand meters will explode. To disarm it, twist the top to the left until it is closed."
Tommy was horrified. "I cannot carry this!"
"You must. Every adult carries this cylinder. You would not be considered one of The People if you did not. Of course, you are not obligated to use it should the need arise."
"I could not!” Tommy replied. “I would not!"
"That is your choice," she said, and turned again to go up the stairs.
Tommy shook his head. His mind was already buzzing with possibilities. This is just too much for now. I'll worry about the consequences of all this later. Maybe doing the work I came up here for will settle my mind.
Each of the computers he had to replace was one of an original two. Every backup computer had been cannibalized for parts. It would be nice, just once, to have a working computer to experiment with. When he had located all of the backup circuitry blocks, he turned to the intercom near the navigation computer. "Seth, this is Tommy, are you there?"
"Yes, Lord Tommy, I'm here,
Tommy stood frozen by the intercom. "Seth, we'll talk about the lord stuff later. For now I need some more printouts of circuitry blocks. Since I have the run of the ship now, maybe you could just tell me where the printer is, and I'll take care of it."
"I would be happy to do it for you, Lord Tommy, or tell you where the printer is, either one."
"Humph," Tommy said. "I tell you what. I'll send one of my apprentices over to you. You give him instructions and send him on to me."
"Yes, Lord Tommy."
This could be bad.
The apprentice who manned the intercom in the guildhall gave no indication that he knew Tommy's new status. He addressed Tommy as Master Tommy and said he would send someone. A few minutes later, a different apprentice came for the circuitry blocks, and Tommy went with him to the printer. By the end of the hour, Tommy had replaced the blocks in their compartments and returned to the guildhall, printouts in hand.
That was enough time for word to spread throughout the human decks of the ship. In his walk from the elevator, no one would meet his eyes. If he spoke to someone he knew, the response he got was. "Yes, Lord Tommy." In the guildhall, he found everyone crowded in one corner, talking, not working. His entry brought silence.
This will never do. I'll never fulfill my side of this contract if everyone treats me like a lord. I wouldn't like having to do all of this alone.
He stood for a moment in front of his guild members. "I want you to know I didn't ask for this," Tommy said. "As far as I'm concerned, everything is the same in this guild. I'm still the guildmaster, the youngest guildmaster ever, and you are my journeymen and apprentices, learning something new and different. With that knowledge, we are making the ship better for everyone, not just the lords."
He filled the continued silence following his speech with, "That means it's all right for you to speak, for starters."
"How can everything be the same?" Vent asked. "They made you a lord."
"Am I seven feet tall? Do I eat raw fish? Do I have a tail and prefer to swim rather than walk?” He looked around the room. No one spoke. “They can call me a lord, but that doesn't make me one. Will I have you killed if you speak up to me or look me in the eye? I won't. I'm not one of their species. I'm as human as you are.
"There is a good side to this. lords get all sorts of privileges. The members of my guild will have unlimited access to the ship. As a lord, I'll make it so. Any resource we need, I should be able to get. We have a lot to do, and this will make our work easier and faster.
“But the best reason is, I'm not going to act like a lord. I can't keep you in this guild, but I hope you will all stay. Talk it over. Let me know what you decide."
Tommy picked up the printouts and went to his quarters.
Potter met him at the door with his "You've been gone all day and left me cooped up in here" meow.
Tommy sat cross-legged on the floor and dumped the paper to the side. "I'm sure you won't desert me. Not for this reason, anyway. Giving someone a different label matters to humans and Nesu, not cats. You aren't fooled, are you Potter?" Potter butted Tommy's hand with his head. "You know what's important," Tommy said as he scratched behind Potter's ears.
He picked up the attitude control printout and sat at his desk. The code offered no surprises at first: the same separation of operating system, drivers, execution space, and application programs. The console sent the ship's new attitude along with a rotational velocity to the computer. The main application program calculated a new attitude for the ship as variations along x-, y-, and z-axes with the starting attitude for each movement defined as the zero point for each axis. That was straightforward. That program's output was sent to a device driver. Another program received information from the same device driver and passed the information along to the console.
None of the parameters sent in either direction had anything to do with the ship's mass. That should matter, shouldn't it? What kind of attitude thrusters did the ship use, anyway? The device driver that created the final output was the first real surprise. He had seen that series of ten-dimensional arrays filled with base twelve numbers before.
He found the insystem drive control printout. The listing included an application that almost duplicated the attitude control program--it would have to--and a program that calculated vectors and acceleration for the ship to follow. The printout also contained a device driver that created ten-dimensional arrays filled with base twelve numbers.
He pushed the first two paper stacks to one side and picked up the gravity control printout. Now that he knew what to look for, he could practically turn to the page. How was gravity related to ten-dimensional arrays filled with base twelve numbers? He hummed to himself. What he should be asking was how a spherical spaceship could have identical gravity from the upper deck to the lower deck and from one end of each deck to the other. Why hadn't that occurred to him before? What laws of physics besides traveling faster than light had the lords repealed? What were those device drivers talking to?
His stomach growled with a rumble loud enough to chase Potter off his perch on the edge of Tommy's desk. The last time he had eaten was early that morning, before all this happened.
I've got to quit causing this, Tommy decided, as his entry into the meal room brought complete silence. Finally, someone, Valin, stood up from his table and met Tommy at the door.
Valin kept his gaze lowered. "Will you be eating in our meal room today, Lord Tommy?"
"Yes, I will, damn it. Do I look like someone who likes raw fish?"
Valin cowered away from him.
He grabbed Valin's arm and pulled him up, then raised his voice so everyone in the room could hear. "You know. I've been a so-called lord for less than a day, and I'm already sick of it. You have no reason to be afraid of me. I'm human, like you. I'll make a deal with you. You can treat me like a lord if real lords are present; otherwise, I want it the way it was before. Does anyone have a problem with that?"
"What if a warrior is present?" Valin asked after a long pause.
"If it matters, you can treat me like a lord when a warrior is present. Now, can we get on with dinner?"
He leaned back against the doorjamb, his stomach still rumbling. We have to get past this. Give them a while to work it out.
Valin returned to his table and joined a low-pitched debate that went on for several minutes. Other conversations at other tables were interrupted by frequent glances in his direction. With a flurry of activity, the groups sent a member to other groups. These new groups talked, and then more people
scurried from table to table. The noise died down, and someone at a small table--Tommy recognized him as the guildmaster of the Electricians Guild--stood up. "We would be pleased to have you join us, Master Tommy"
The next morning, his journeymen and apprentices tried to greet him as if nothing had happened. They didn't entirely succeed, of course, but Tommy appreciated their effort. He told Vent and Sanos to continue working on ponds and lakes with every available apprentice except one, whom he needed to help carry his printouts to the bridge.
"Make it someone who doesn't mind climbing and getting dirty," he said.
That brought blank stares from both of them, until Vent recommended Dals. "I almost transferred him to the electricians, he spent so much time in the wiring shafts."
"He's perfect."
A half-hour later, he and Dals stood beside the attitude controller, examining the wires emerging from its rear. He separated a single cable from the rest. "Here's what I propose to do. I want to follow this cable wherever it goes in this ship. I already know it extends to the central column. From there, we will climb down the wiring shaft. I don't know how far."
Dals went into the wiring shaft first. "Your cable goes into a box at the top of the shaft along with other cables just like it."
"Let me in," Tommy said. He moved past Dals to stand on a small platform beside the box. "This is another computer." Now what is this for?
All of the cables but three led back to computers on the bridge sub-deck. The other cables disappeared into the darkness below.
Tommy attached a light to his belt and led the way down the ladder. The mystery of one of the cables ended on the deck with the targeting computer. Outside the central column wall, Tommy found the tag he had used to mark the cable for controlling the ship's attitude from that console.
The second cable stretched to the computer below the track control room and was also tagged as controlling the ship's attitude.
Markings on the wall indicated they were just above the Commons' roof, when the last cable disappeared through the wall toward the axis of the central column. They had spent the entire morning descending that far, and Tommy considered taking a break for lunch. The cable's new direction drove food completely out of his mind.
"We just passed an access door," Tommy shouted up to Dals. "See if the cable emerges inside. I'm going down to the next door."
Tommy watched Dals feet move back up the ladder, and then continued down. He found the next hatch a few feet below. If the cable goes through at ceiling level, this must be it.
The hatch was difficult to open, as if no one had been through it in a long time. The seals at the edge peeled back with a tearing noise, releasing a puff of stale, metallic-smelling air. His lamp revealed a passageway leading toward the axis of the central column. The cable they had been following continued along the ceiling.
"The cable didn't go through the room above," Dals said from above him, "so I came down."
"It's here." Tommy swung into the low passageway. "At least we won't be climbing for a while."
Tommy followed the cable to a gap in the ceiling. The cable crossed the gap and disappeared into a dark green wall. He had leaned forward to see where the cable disappeared when he felt Dals grab him by the back of his tunic.
"Watch out, Master Tommy. The gap goes all the way around the passage. You could fall through the floor."
Tommy held out his light, and kneeled down to peer over the edge. The gap was approximately two feet wide and stretched as far down as he could see. To the left and right, the fissure curved until the near wall met the green wall on the opposite side of the gap. Above where the wire met the wall, his light reflected on a ceiling. The wall's top edge was some distance below the ceiling.
With his feet pressed against opposite edges of the passage, and with Dals to steady him, he climbed enough to see over the edge. Rather than the top of a wall, he found a surface extending into the distance about two feet below the ceiling. In every direction he looked, the green object seemed to float away from the chamber surface. The single contact between the containing wall of the ship and the object was the cable.
Tommy pushed out to examine the point where the cable met the green surface. The cable terminated in an ordinary male plug, inserted into an equally ordinary female jack. He saw markings on the wall next to the plug. In spite of Dals' grunts, he leaned out even more to get a closer look. The symbols seemed to be writing, but, if they were, it wasn't in the lords' language that he knew.
Dals
Cold sweat dripped from Dals’ face.
He had enjoyed his work with the electricians. Climbing the cable shafts had allowed him to see many new parts of the ship. He had looked outside the shafts on each deck, and found one part of the ship much like another. Even what he had seen of the lords' decks wasn't much different from what he was used to.
This was something else. The gigantic green thing Tommy had found made his skin tingle and his stomach feel queasy. If he had eaten recently, he would have thrown up.
He wanted to run. Instead, he had to hold on to Master Tommy, who seemed intent on getting them killed. One slip by either of them would pull them down the gap at the passage edge. What could be worth this risk? Why was Master Tommy interested in this thing?
Not that he understood anything about Master Tommy, anyway. Master Tommy's mind was always somewhere else, even when he was talking to you. Some of the farmers said he was the one sent to rescue them, to return them to Earth. What did they think now that Tommy was a lord?
Tommy said he was human, but he didn't look like any human Dals knew. He didn't act like any human Dals knew, either. Was this what all feral humans were like? If they were, what would it be like to return to Earth? How could the ship humans ever live with millions like Tommy?
"Pull me in," Tommy said.
Gladly, Dals thought. Aloud he said, "Are we staying much longer?"
When Tommy had both feet on the floor, he grinned at Dals. "Does this bother you? You were fine with climbing in the shafts. I don't know how far you could fall here, but the cable shafts run the height of the ship."
"This thing’s not right. It's like nothing else on the ship. That's what bothers me."
"I think you're right. We've discovered something alien."
Tommy started laughing, then continued, "Something alien at the exact center of the ship."
"What's funny?" Dals asked.
"Not so long ago, everything on this ship was alien to me. I've come a long way.
"Are you hungry? Maybe some food will make you feel better. I know it would me. And I need a tool, anyway."
He’s coming back to this place! Dals thought.
Chapter Thirteen: A Story Told
The next day, Tommy ruined a second set of clothes climbing in shafts above and below the Commons. What he found explained little. A dark green cylinder, about a hundred meters in diameter, floated inside the central column in a space extending to the top of the Commons and for a distance below the Commons. As best he could tell, the cylinder's center coincided with the exact center of the ship, and he couldn't understand how it stayed that way; he found nothing from the ship that touched the cylinder except the one cable from the bridge.
Nor did he find a break in the cylinder's surface except the one female jack. After touching the surface with an insulated rod without effect, he touched it with his hand. The cylinder wall was smooth and cool and seemed inert. Dals reported his skin tingled and itched whenever he was close to the cylinder, but Tommy hadn't felt that. The pencil and paper rubbing of the symbols next to the jack proved they were not from the lords’ language.
That night, he decided he knew enough to draw one obvious conclusion. Cables from computers that controlled internal gravity and effected any movement of the ship were all united with a single cable. The cylinder had to be the transit drive, insystem drive, attitude control, and gravity generator all in one. A reasonable second conclusion was that the lords hadn't built t
he drive. Maybe they had built the ship, but if they had, they built it around a drive they got from someone else. And if the ship were two thousand years old, the drive had been in the ship the whole time. Major sections of the hull would have to be removed to move the drive in later. He had to talk with Ull.
The encounter the next day didn't start well. Tommy entered Ull's chamber while she was eating her morning meal, and she ignored him while she floated on her back and finished her fish.
She scrubbed her hands with bottom sand and then joined him at the flat rock. "You have been one of The People for two days,” she said. “We bestowed a great honor on you, and you insult us in return."
Tommy took a step back from the water’s edge. "How?"
"You are still living with the humans."
"You expect me to move up here and live in one of your ponds?"
"That would be proper," she replied in a cold tone.
Why do I have this argument with everybody? "And what would I eat?" he said. "You know I don't eat raw fish. This place was not built for humans, and my work would suffer."
After a slow backflip in the water, Ull said, "That is a consideration. However, you must maintain appearances. Normally, you would live in one of the larger lakes with other unmarried males." She gave an undulating whistle. "But, because of your unique situation, I have obtained quarters with a private pond for you."
"You think this is funny. You are not concerned at all."
"Yes, I am," she replied. "I just think it is funny, too.” She whistled again and slapped the water. “I have been trying to imagine you competing against the other males for the eligible females, trying to gain their attention. Doing flips and rolls and leaping from the water."
"It was your idea to make me one of The People," Tommy said. "At least, I assume it was your idea. You should have considered this first. Can I do both? Will anyone care if I have quarters in both places?"
"Where will you keep your cat? I know that will be home to you." She agitated the water with her arms. "No matter. Keep both quarters. Though, if you must meet with one of The People, do so as one of us, not as a human."
A Larger Universe Page 20
