A Hop, Skip and a Jump (Family Law Book 4)

by Mackey Chandler

  Clare had been dealing with Derf enough to know she needed to order a Derf sized serving and cups. Gordon could tell it was heavy for her when she brought the serving tray out and sat it on the table. She sat the carafe and glass on the deck and poured Gordon a dainty one liter cup. It was a demitasse cup for Derf.

  "Oh, that's good," Gordon said surprised. It was strong with cinnamon and cloves, and something else he couldn't place, so he asked.

  "Cardamom," Clare said, "and honey. I figured you'd like it. I haven't met a Derf yet who didn't.

  That was good actually, to hear she'd been socializing, not just isolating herself. She was having some coffee too, and she didn't fortify it from the bottle, so all to the good, so far.

  "I'm not terribly good at subtle," Gordon said, "so I'll just ask outright. Do you know why you've been down, put your tutors off, and have even been off your feed? Is it anything with which I can help? Because I'd be happy to, if I can."

  "It's no mystery, I just haven't been sharing it with anyone, but since you ask . . . I turned eighteen. I lost track of the Earth calendar and wasn't even aware I'd turned eighteen until a few days after, but then it hit me how far behind I am. Back home when you are eighteen you are done with school if you aren't going to college. You can ask for your own apartment if you're going to live on the negative tax. You can marry or go in the military. If you can pass the tests, or if you're rich, you can go to college. By the time she was my age my mom was married and carrying me already. She had an actual job and she and my dad stayed off the negative. Nobody in your fleet wanted me, because I was useless. Here I am, at eighteen, and I'm still struggling to catch up on middle school stuff. I'm getting it, but it's hard, and I feel like I'm going to be middle aged before I'm all the way caught up. Tell me that isn't depressing!" Clare challenged him.

  "Nope, no way I'm going to tell you how to feel," Gordon said. "I'm older, and alien, and my life is completely different than your experience, but I'm not stupid. People feel how they feel. It's insulting to deny them the right to how they feel, whether it makes any sense to you or not. In this case, even as different as we are, I can empathize with that, so there . . ."

  Clare just blinked a lot and looked at him. That obviously wasn't the tack she was expecting him to take. Probably, she expected a big pep talk, and reminders how good she had it.

  "So what are you going to suggest?" Clare asked. "Call my tutors and get back on the ball?"

  "Gods no, if that has been depressing, why would you want to keep beating yourself up?"

  "Uh, because I can't think of anything else to do?" she admitted.

  "Have you done anything but hit the books since you got here?" Gordon asked.

  "Not really. I mean, that's why I'm here, isn't it? What else would I do?"

  "No wonder you're burned out," Gordon marveled. "Do you ever do anything for fun?"

  "I'm not sure I ever learned how to do that. On Earth the telly showed rich people playing golf to relax, or sailing their yacht. You could enter the lottery to get in one of the National Parks if you wanted, but trudging around carrying a big sack on your back never appealed to me. I could never figure out the big attraction to go get all tired, and sweaty, and dirty far from a shower. I'm not a party girl to go to clubs and dance and drink. I don't have any friends to do that with me, and that seems to be the attraction to partying. Do you do anything for fun?" Clare asked him.

  "Yes, but I admit when I was your equivalent age I didn't know anything I wanted to do for fun," Gordon remembered. "The Mothers aren't big on urging clan members to develop hobbies or waste time doing anything that isn't productive work. That's pretty much why I ran away from home. I saw years and years ahead of me making furniture or barrels. I sort of suspected when you have made your first hundred barrels or so it loses all its glamour."

  "You ran away from home?" Clare said, incredulous. "I thought that only happened in books and really bad old flat movies."

  "Well, it was either going to be the stupidest thing I ever did, and end in disaster, or give me freedom and a life without cooperage," Gordon started. An hour later he'd told the high points of his travels to Fishtown over his first year on his own, and he was out of coffee. To keep going would just tire both of them. Perhaps another day she'd want to hear more. There was a lot more he could tell her of course, but the story did what he intended. Now that she knew more about him, Clare was looking at him like he was a person instead of a problem. Now was the time he could offer suggestions and she might really consider them.

  "I really think you could benefit from a change of pace and doing some new things," Gordon suggested after he wound down about himself. "Yes, you have a good deal here, and Lee gave you a wonderful opportunity. But you aren't like a worker in a factory swiping his card on the time clock, in and out, and required to crank out a hundred widgets an hour to keep his job. You're being harder on yourself than anybody. Why don't you take a vacation? Go someplace like Fargone. Lee has a condo there you can borrow. Sit on a beach and do nothing a couple days. Eat out at some ethnic places. Try a round of golf even if it seems silly, just to try it once, and maybe understand why people go crazy over it. I did. It still seems stupid to me but it was educational. I'm still amazed they make Derf clubs.

  "Try some of the things people do for hobbies. Make a clay pot or a necklace. I used to draw with colored pencils and ink. When we explored I drew things and it gave me a better eye for composition when I had to take photographs. When we found Providence I did hundreds of photos of plants and flowers and small creatures. I'm glad I could do them well, because a lot of them ended up being published in xeno-journals. Wasn't there anything you wanted to do back on Earth you could never try?"

  Clare got the oddest look on her face. "We lived in an apartment for awhile. I must have been eight or ten years old. I'd forgotten about it until you asked. They cleared the land and built other apartments next door, and I stole time from my lessons and watched out the window. I really wanted to know how to run a bulldozer like I saw them doing. I thought about that for the longest time. Long for a little kid at least, and my mother of course thought it was ridiculous. I'd managed to forget about it until you asked me."

  "I'd pick that over golf if we were both going to go do it tomorrow," Gordon said. "Lee wouldn't begrudge you buying a bull dozer if you needed it to learn, but I imagine there have to be bulldozer schools. I'll tell you a little secret, why you can afford to take time and do some things you want to try like that. And in the end it isn't going to matter to you if it takes you to thirty or forty years old to get where you feel fully 'caught up' to where you should be."

  Clare looked very skeptical of that statement, but she listened. Gordon explained about life extension therapy, and that Lee had already received it. Clare was shocked.

  "Back home, they said that kind of thing drove people crazy when they tried it!"

  "Yes, there were a bunch of kids they gave gene therapy. Some place in Europe, I forget where," Gordon said. "They were trying to make them smarter, trying to make them all child prodigies of one sort or another. I'm not sure if they were trying to make them live longer yet. It was quite successful when they were very young, and then they all went very unstable as teens. They all ended up in residential mental institutions later. It was sad. It also made a convenient excuse to ban all sorts of gene therapies."

  "Other stuff too," Clare remembered. "They said it made you get diseases. They lied?"

  "The best sorts of lies are the ones that have a kernel of truth, and some of the worst lies are those of deliberate omission," Gordon taught her.

  "Those sons of bitches!" Clare declared.

  "You disparage dogs, but yeah. They lie. They've been lying, and unfortunately they are going to keep lying," Gordon said, wearily. "We have little power to stop them, and it's a huge division between the Earthies and other Humans off planet, and even other people like Derf. This big of a lie is always unstable, and it's not going to end well," Gordo
n predicted. "But guessing when it will fail is very difficult too."

  "But you will have an early opportunity to get it. The people on the Moon and Fargone already have it. I think everybody who wants it on Derfhome will have it within a generation, because Lee and I certainly don't intend to keep it secret.

  "Other places like New Japan or the smaller colonies? I just don't know their dynamics. They mostly seem tightly connected to Earth, just like most Humans here were until recently. We're not going to start some crazy kind of propaganda campaign to inform the Earthies. I've had enough war with Earth, thank you, and that might start one.

  "Lee and I are going to make sure it's known on Derfhome. Sally from the bank just was informed about it. I offered it to her as an inducement for employment. The point is, this changes things for you now, doesn't it? You don't have to begrudge a decade to catch up if you need it. You'll have lots of extra decades."

  "It changes everything," Clare said. "But what about you? Does it work for Derf?"

  "We just started working on that side of it. I'm only middle aged by Derf standards. I have time. We're pretty confident we can make it work for us. But you're sweet to ask."

  Chapter 16

  "Lee, this old material you sent me on Human drive theory is interesting. My drive techie, Musical, apparently stayed up all night reading it," Talker said. That clearly amazed him. "He just called me, looking all frazzled but excited still, before he went to crash out. Now, I confess, the science is beyond me. I have to take him at his word that he understands not only the basis of the Badger drive, but he says the Human math is similarly straight forward and compelling.

  "He did say we Badgers have only used the transactional model of quantum phenomena, and that the Copenhagen model, while it doesn't contradict the math, is confusing and needlessly obscure. He didn't really explain them to me, but I remember the names he used.

  "The fellow says he was already writing a mathematical translation program to transpose the symbols and operational nomenclature between several Badger and Human fields, including what you call Fourier analysis. He did admit it is going to take him awhile, but I'd be amazed if he can do it at all without arguing about how fast."

  "Musical sounds like he's a prize," Lee admitted. "The last time somebody tried to explain drive theory to me I couldn't get my head wrapped around it. It was a sore point actually, because he was a bit condescending about it. My parents taught me some math, but I never went to a formal school. We weren't the sort who played mathematical games for fun, it was a tool. Perhaps now that I am older and have more resources I can pursue it sometime." And with life extension I have more time to get around to it, she thought.

  "Perhaps you can find somebody to be a resource for him," Talker requested. "He found a difference between the seminal paper and the later publications. The original has factors for the electrical force and the gravitational force. The later papers drop the symbol for gravitation. It still describes the real world just fine, as long as gravity is a constant, but it seemed technically wrong to him, and he's one of these people that looks at a mathematical expression like you would a song. It was a glaring hole to him he described as being like a sudden inappropriate silence in the middle of a movement."

  "I haven't even looked at those files myself," Lee confessed. "I just sucked everything I could grab that was related onto my pad while I there and had full access. I'd love to own a copy of the whole Earth web, but the reality is they are adding to it faster than it's possible to buy it or move it by ship. We buy as much as we can afford of the English web, but even that fraction we have to filter. Just the redundancies alone will drive you crazy eliminating them. Have your guy make his own annotations to the files, when he's vertical again. I'll find somebody to review them," Lee promised.

  "Thank you. It's like an itch to him and I'm sure he'd appreciate having a peer with whom he can discuss it. There isn't another Badger with us that can do that," Talker said.

  "I'll see what I can do, and support the effort, and even fund it. But if I do I expect the fruits of it to be proprietary. He'd be rewarded richly, just like fleet shares. He'd have appropriate credit for the discovery. But not simply own the tech it creates. He's your man, are you willing to tell him I'm his boss on this project if he works for me and I call the shots?"

  "You have never done anything harmful to me or my civilization," Talker said. "If he can't see it as a separate endeavor I will tell him not to accept your aid."

  "Be aware, the Mothers were concerned with you appearing exhausted yesterday. I told them it was rough on you because you were a city boy. I figured you'd rather that than the whole scary tale of how you learned to fly and I almost got trampled. They'd never let us near the woods again. They did very specifically say they would declare their support of your mission to the other Mothers at the fall festival."

  "I guess I am a city boy," Talker agreed, "so there's no harm from telling the truth. I'm not sure how much the Mothers and I have in common, except we'll both want to support your new claims commission, but that's very nice of the Mothers."

  "Don't dismiss it as just a gesture," Lee said. "Anytime the Mothers of a clan make a declaration it is law, no matter how innocuous it may seem. If some other clan takes exception to it they could end up with Garret out in a field with an ax, and he either defends their word or gets chopped up. You can be sure they will make the statement carefully, and with as little possibility to arouse controversy as possible, but it's never without risk. It does however work with their decision to engage more with the trade towns, since you are located on clan neutral territory."

  "Thank you for explaining," Talker said. "I'll try to find something worthy in the way of trade or culture to make their effort worthwhile, something more than just enameled jewelry." He had that look, silent for a moment that usually meant he was being thoughtful. "If there isn't anything I can do directly for the Mothers, or the clan, you belong to Red Tree now. You seek their benefit. If I can do you a turn for the good say so, it pays on the same debt to my mind, even if the Mothers don't know it or wouldn't understand it."

  "That presumes I know what is good for Red Tree, or even the Derf as a whole. Better than the Mothers even," Lee protested. "I haven't claimed that."

  Talker looked grimly serious and a little put-out. "No matter what you claim, the blunt reality is that if the actions you are taking don't serve the Derf and everyone who touches on them, quite well, we are all in a lot of trouble." He just nodded and terminated his call without another word. That was a means of emphasis, to leave it as his last thought, and it did exactly what he wanted it to do, make Lee think.

  Lee sat, considering it carefully. What Talker said was true, although she didn't welcome hearing it. It was a huge burden on her shoulders. The voyages, the claims program, all could help, or she could end up messing everything up worse than it already was. It wasn't like what everybody had been doing before was so great and making everybody happy. Doing nothing had risks too, although it shifted the blame to other people if she sat back and let them mess it up their way. It wasn't like what she wanted to do would fix everything. It just had to be a little bit better to be worth trying. She couldn't see any way forward that was better than what she was doing. Not without a miracle, such as every thinking being in known space suddenly attaining sainthood, and kind and thoughtful reasonableness. Like that was going to happen!

  * * *

  Lee didn't wish to ask Thor anything about jump technology, and he was the only person who she was sure knew anything about it. She checked with the engineer off the Retribution, Jeremiah Ellis, and explained she had a Badger who wanted to brainstorm with somebody about drive tech theory, and was happy he didn't immediately suggest Thor.

  "With a Human?" he asked, and seemed uncertain that was a good idea.

  "With anybody who knows what he is talking about," Lee said. "Human, Derf, it just happens he's the only Badger here conversant in this tech, or he could consult with his own
. My understanding is that he is super smart and has made some headway understanding Human nomenclature and thought processes."

  'Engineers deal with the practical stuff," Jeremiah told her. "They run the theory past us in training, and then you never really use it in operation. I think what you want is an academic. Why don't you take this to the university and see if they can help you? They're more concerned with theory than hardware, and making it work."

  "OK, that seems reasonable," she said, and thanked him. His relief was visible.

  Lee called her bank, and asked how one approached a university on Derfhome and was there one with a department that would deal with jump drive theory? Lee had grown used to relying on her bank for everything from rating suppliers to shopping for personal gifts. They didn't disappoint her. The director Darius knew an official of a local university which predated Human contact and had enthusiastically embraced the relevant Human studies. He soon had a name and contact information for Lee.

  She arranged to talk to the Derf, who used the Human name Born, and introduced him to Musical. They enthusiastically agreed to meet since they were close. She agreed to conference with them when they were together and introduced. It wasn't long until they called back.

  "Are you two willing to work together to understand this? I don't care about the glory of discovery, but I'm interested in owning any practical tech that can be made from it. I'll come up with a name for the association to put on your pay checks, and tell my bank to send you standard research crew agreements."