"Has he shared a formulation for an exotic material with strong gravitational properties?"
"Uh, no, although these he sent are very interesting," Born said.
"And you haven't sent back instruction for gravity plate materials?" Lee asked.
"No, although it seems reasonable to reciprocate. We can certainly ask for more specific materials in which you are interested," Born offered.
"No, please, don't make any reply yet. There are several critical facts I failed to tell you. I'd like to talk with both you and Musical before you enter the next phase of discovery. I have a com address for Jeff Singh's business partner, but I'm not sure I have the one you're using. Send me his current address, please. I'll make a brief reply to him and express thanks, but I beg you please, don't send him anything about gravity plate fabrication before I talk to you."
"Well certainly, if that's what you want. Your kindness has made our entire line of research possible. Here's his addy," Born said, putting it on her screen.
"How about if I come into Derfhome City and see you the day after tomorrow?" Lee asked.
"That would be pleasant. Where would you like to meet?" Born asked.
"I'll stay in what they call the Old Hotel. I'll get a suite and you can join me any time towards dinner. I'll have them serve us in my rooms, and I'll reserve rooms for both of you so you don't have to go home tired if we carry the discussion on late."
"I'm looking forward to that," Born said. "I know Musical will be delighted too."
"Until then," Lee said, and disconnected.
She composed a message to Singh before even getting up from the com.
Mr. Singh,
We have not met, but I know your friend April. I think well of her, and would like to meet both you and Heather in the fullness of time. I certainly don't wish to start any relationship with you on an adversarial basis, but my hired people got ahead of me with surprising initiative when they contacted you. I thank you for the cordial tone you took in dealing with them, and the information you shared. However, when it comes to other information, of greater gravity, I must politely ask you show me yours before I show you mine.
Sincerely, First daughter of the Third love son of the Four Hundred-Seventy Third First Mother of Red Tree, by the Hero of the Chain Bound Lands, Second line of the short haired folk, of Gordon - Lee Anderson."
* * *
"I have to go to Derfhome tomorrow and talk to some people I hired, doing research for me," Lee told Gordon by text. She wasn't even sure where he was, except somewhere around the Keep, because he'd joined her at breakfast. She actually wondered if he had a romance going, but that was none of her business. "It's a cordial meeting and no need of an escort, unless you have bank business or something. Tell me if you need anything picked up and I'll shop for it while I'm in the big city."
"Talker may be ready to go back. I'll ask if he wants to share the ride, if he doesn't mind a walk. I'm not that rushed today so I'll walk out to the saddle by the fort for pickup. It does create a stir and people stop working and come outside to watch any time an air car comes in and lands. Some of them will stand and stare until it leaves. The Mothers haven't said anything but it's disruptive." Love you, Lee
* * *
"Well, it was worth a try," Heather said. "Maybe it's for the better."
"Why?" Jeff asked, confused.
"If her people had blabbed what sort of material they have with interesting gravitational properties, then what would have happened?" Heather asked, reasonably.
"It might have given me insight to make quantum fluid like my stepmom supplies us and made us a little more secure and independent," Jeff said.
"And what would they have expected?" Heather asked Jeff. "Would they not have thought you should reciprocate with your own formula of at least equal value?"
"But I can't, and there's no firm expectation I could, even using their information. At least not for awhile, until I had time to work on it some more."
"And what are the chances they would believe that, and not simply conclude you cheated them and treated their trust with contempt?"
"Oh," Jeff said, softly.
* * *
Born looked stunned, Musical looked rattled. It was a new look in Lee's catalog of expressions for a Badger. She was sure neither believed anything she said at first. They looked at each other with a silent but firm conviction she was psychotic, when she described life extension therapy. It was pretty scary to see such a hard censure on both alien faces, especially since she liked both of them. Lee could tell they were absolutely sure she was delusional when she described her ride in Gabriel's ship.
The saving grace was she'd developed the firm habit of wearing a body cam whenever she could. It looked like a piece of jewelry, the lens shaped like a faceted gem, not the curved dome of a lens everyone expected. She had almost her entire voyage with the Little Fleet recorded that way. She'd also worn it on her dinner trip with Gabriel, and recorded the spectacular sequence of jumps taken in simply going to dinner.
"Would you run that again?" Musical asked in awe.
Lee cycled it again for Musical, but Born said nothing, sulking.
"I hope you aren't going to say I created an elaborate video to perpetuate a hoax on you two?" Lee worried.
"No, I'm upset you didn't tell us the whole deal right from the very start. We looked like fools, blundering around, reaching ridiculous conclusions."
"To whom would you seem so foolish?" Lee asked. "Not me. I knew what you were working with. I didn't give you enough at the start to figure it out, and frankly it's not about you. I'd bet anything Jeff Singh doesn't think you're fools. He's likely terrified of how close you both have gotten to his deepest secret."
"That's what's bothering Born," Musical said. "He was thinking he was a player."
"I absolutely was not," Born insisted. "But I thought I had some idea what was going on. Now I find out I have no idea what was going on, not just in my world, but my Galaxy."
"I suppose they haven't gone off to other galaxies," Musical said, but without confidence.
"It would be reckless to assume the jumps would scale up several orders of magnitude," Born said. "You'd need to send an automated drone first, and then a crewed vessel when the drone showed it was safe."
"Jeff, and the two ladies who are his partners, would be loath to do that," Lee said.
"Why?" they both asked with nearly one voice.
"They don't want the technology to get out," Lee said. "Bad enough to let it loose to those you know, but do you want to send off such a drone, for the very reason it might not come back, and then wonder who or what might find it among the stars?"
"Make it blow up if it doesn't return in a set period of time," Musical decided quickly.
"Well, that makes it all better," Lee said, sarcastically. "You'd risk sending a probe into an unknown alien star system, that might have a very advanced race. One that has no particular grudge against you, yet. Then, when they send a ship with a few of their best and brightest to check out your drone, maybe the local ruler's favorite son aboard, it would blow up on them for no particular reason. What a great introduction that would be. Then assume that they're smart enough to back track it to us for a worst case scenario."
'That seems a very low probability," Musical said.
"Unlikely doesn't hack it, tell me impossible," Lee invited.
"I've had a hard time saying impossible ever since our mother's elderly cleaning lady ran off with the gardener's handsome young son," Musical admitted.
"You two can see how it might technically work, but consider, you'd both have a very hard time dealing with all the political fallout such a device would dump on you. It's a horrible burden of responsibility," Lee said. "If you aren't risk averse with a secret like this you're crazy!"
"So then, you want the burden of this secret . . . because?" Born asked.
"I haven't got any better sense," Lee answered flippantly.
"So she is crazy,"
Musical decided, "Just not any common crazy we'll ever figure out."
"Works for me," Born agreed. "These three at Luna sound about as bad."
"So, do you want to keep working for me to understand the drive, or do you want to be cut loose, and not be associated with me anymore?" Lee asked. "Our contract is posted to the public net," she reminded them. "You can work on theory all you want, but not the hardware. I'd remind you, I have never been cheap with my people. If this leads to commercial hardware I will be generous. You can ask Talker if we didn't treat him very well for his service to the fleet."
"I really want to know how this drive works, and I don't stand a chance of finding out without your financial backing," Born admitted. "I am allowed business and deals outside the university."
"Yes, crass as it sounds, I don't have the resources to pursue this," Musical said. "Wealth for its own sake doesn't excite me. I see people consumed by the desire to be rich, but I have to say, it's nice when it allows you to do things like this. I know Talker allowed this. But I'd feel better to have your leave to keep him up to date on it."
"I don't have any secrets from Talker," Lee said. "He is my friend and will never betray my interests." That rattled Musical far more than she realized, and he was able to hide that from Lee, this time. She was getting better and better at subtle expressions. Musical wasn't averse to having secret or two from his boss himself. The easy matter of fact way Lee said it with no hesitation had a ring of truth to it even across their species differences.
"Your attitude is a fair explanation of how I feel about having this drive," Lee allowed, more seriously than her earlier quip. "Not that it will make me rich, because if I was just interested in money I have as much as I can reasonably spend. But the drive will allow me to do interesting things. Gabriel, who gave me that ride, tried to minimize the benefit, saying how it served us better to go slow when the Little Fleet went to Badger space, but I don't see him giving up his fast ship to go slow. I didn't argue with him. It was obviously self serving."
"Perhaps it was a misguided attempt to make you feel better, since he couldn't share it."
Lee looked at Born amazed. She hadn't explained that Gabriel seemed to have a fixation on her being like April. It said a lot about her perception of social things that an alien could give her insights on Human relationships. "That could be," Lee told him.
* * *
"The way I see it," April said, "we have an indefinite period of time here, in which we can head off or mitigate other Humans, the Derf and the Badger civilization getting an upgraded jump drive, but we know it's coming now that they understand the theoretical basis."
"No, I can't see that we can have much influence on it at all," Heather said, shaking her head. "Once they see the theoretical potential there's little we could do to make them turn aside from pursuing it. It's simply too attractive a prize. Not unless, as April would say, we do evil, such as assassinate the minds we know are working on it. Mitigating it may be a possibility, but I have to ask how?"
"Indeed," Jeff agreed. "Once you've gone over to dealing in assassination what do numbers mean? Once you are dirty you have to keep covering up and protecting your investment. That naturally progresses to assassinating anyone we know capable of working on it. There's no turning back once you start down that road. They would then figure out who the only party is with an interest in suppressing the technology. Thus it eventually progresses to get ugly and personal for us. We'd all have a big bull's-eye painted on our backs, and I couldn't even blame them for responding to it that way, tit for tat."
"What are our objectives?" Heather asked. "Have they changed? Do they need to change?"
All three sat and pondered that in silence for awhile.
"The idea we started with was to avoid seeing all the political factions on Earth carry their conflicts off Earth and have war in the solar system and then later, in the stars." April said. "The Derf war was unexpected, but at least it avoided planetary bombardment."
"I think we did pretty well by the solar system," Heather claimed, and looked at either of them to deny it.
"But they would have fought us over denying them the stars," Jeff said.
"We all agreed, at the time," April reminded him. "I still agree. We couldn't get anything we'd have called a victory without being monsters, and for anything less than a total victory our own destruction within the solar system was a real possibility."
Heather shook her head no. "We'd have been branded criminals and outlaws wherever they found us later," she insisted.
"And likely we'd have been tested again, if it weren't for the battle of Thessaly," Jeff said.
"Yes, but people discount lessons from before they were born," April insisted. "So we can't count on them remembering that very long, as a lesson to apply to themselves, especially not since they live shorter lives. In each generation, the sort of personalities who take the leadership, discount their predecessors as fools or grunting savages. They think they are the first generation of god-like ones. They figure if only they had been there in the past things would have been different! They'll look at the recordings and say: But we have far better systems and weapons now. Look at this old stuff! We can take them. And they will never allow that we've been improving too."
"We have had some success outside the solar system," Heather insisted. "We stopped the theft of the aboriginals' systems. As long as it has been economically advantageous to explore, rather than try to take what others have found, they have gone for the cheap solution. It's amazing they developed the Claims Commission. I'd have predicted they wouldn't accept it if it had been our idea."
"If it had been our idea instead of theirs, they would have rejected it," Jeff asserted.
"That economic disadvantage of piracy and pillage may change when the cost of transport goes up and the close high grade resources start to be depleted," Jeff warned.
"Revealing the superior drive tech would change that economic balance to make more distant resources accessible at lower cost," April pointed out.
"But it also reduces the cost of interstellar war to where some fool might think it attractive," Jeff warned. "They always think their wars will be cheap, short and victorious."
"At some point we have to admit we've run out of reasons to restrict them for their own good, and we're doing so because we just don't want them to catch up and find the same parts of the sky we've marked for our own," Heather warned. Neither of her companions contradicted her, but they didn't look thrilled at the idea either.
"You have to admit," Jeff finally said, "no matter what label they hang on their government, monarchy, democracy or socialism, they all end up at, 'What ours is ours, and what's yours is ours too.' Tell me one that ever respected property rights once they had the power to take things by force. I can almost assure you that once an Earthie ship sees us in a nice system, with resources, they will have a fit that a couple thousand people think they can own the whole thing. It's always the same refrain, 'It isn't fair!' I do expect some trouble when they find the systems we've taken for ourselves."
"OK, we can't thwart them completely, and simply ignoring them will mean we deal with them when they expand to our holdings. How about the mitigation?" Heather asked.
"That depends on cooperation," Jeff said. "Why should they help us?"
"Because, like us, they don't want to destroy Earth in order to be left alone?" April asked. "If they wanted to, they had the means to reduce North America back to third world status. There are some personalities who would have picked that option first. It would have hurt the whole Earth economy for years. Just the effects of the strike on the Northern Hemisphere agriculture for several years would have been catastrophic."
"If they really would have done that," Jeff said, skeptically.
"You didn't talk to them," April reminded him. "I'm convinced they would have. It's their normal way of waging war on Derfhome. They fight until one clan is annihilated. It was a new thing to even try negotiations and a tre
aty. If I'd known their history before the war I'd have predicted it would happen. If the North Americans broke the treaty again, I have no doubt that would be the first response in a second war. There would be no point to forcing them to the negotiating table again once they proved themselves consistent liars."
"Well if your assessment of their institutional memory is correct, then it's a lost cause already," Jeff said. "When a new generation of North American leaders gets in office they'll find some necessity to ditch the Derf treaty and >WHAM<," he said, slapping the table like he was killing a bug. "They're history."
"The Derf may be smart enough to realize that," Heather speculated. "Perhaps that is the key to gaining their cooperation in denying the Earthies the gravity based drive."
"How so?" Jeff asked, frowning.
"Offer a guarantee of their autonomy if they will keep it to themselves," Heather said. "A mutual defense treaty with them, to tell the North Americans, all the Earthies actually, hands off, or you are taking us on too. It has the advantage it is doable. We can't declare a non-aggression policy everywhere in the heavens, but it is certainly within our ability to protect one star system and planet."
"I like it," April agreed, "because when they starting thinking of aggression, somebody will say - "But the Centralists may intervene just like they did with Derfhome." So it will have a secondary benefit of introducing that doubt. Also, it's all to the good that Derfhome is close to Fargone, and the restraining effect may be even stronger for them."
"What do we get again, for protecting them?" Jeff asked. "Because their protecting us is a polite fiction."
"Now, yes. Take the longer view," Heather argued. "We're sure they are going to get the better drive now that they know the theory. How soon doesn't really matter. We'll be allied with them a lot longer after they have it than before. In fact, offering to have a mutual defense treaty with them after they are on a technological par with us appears to be much more self serving. They might refuse then. By offering it before that happens we seem much more generous and principled. We also greatly reduce the chance Earth will be harmed. We're getting protection for Earth, even if they will never appreciate it."
A Hop, Skip and a Jump (Family Law Book 4) Page 23
